Restoring Albert Shanker`s Original Vision for Charter Schools

Transcription

VOL. 38, NO. 4 | WINTER 2014–2015
www.aft.org /ae
Restoring Albert
Shanker’s Original Vision
for Charter Schools
PAGE 4
14
19
24
32
37
Addressing the
Teaching Gap
High-Stakes
Testing
Asking for Help
in Class
Librarians as
Teachers
Children’s
Literature
SEASON’S READINGS!
Give the gift of reading this holiday season and
register with First Book at www.firstbook.org/AFT.
If you teach, work, or volunteer in a school or
community program that has at least 70 percent of
its kids living in poverty, register today and choose
from thousands of new, high-quality books,
school supplies, and more for 50–90 percent off
retail prices!
Together, we can help to reclaim the
promise of public education by giving
the gift of reading.
Share My Lesson is now offering an
expanded collection of early childhood
education resources! These FREE instructional
materials will help preschool teachers, parents, child
care providers, and school support staff address the
instructional needs of toddler to pre-K learners.
Find resources from early childhood educators as well
as content from these great contributors:
• Sesame Street
• Colorín Colorado
• Hispanic
Information and
Telecommunications
Network Early Learning
Collaborative
• Storyline Online
• WonderGrove Learn
• Professor Garfield
Foundation
www.sharemylesson.com/EarlyChildhood
WHERE WE STAND
Worth Fighting For
RANDI WEINGARTEN, AFT President
FROM CONNECTICUT TO ALASKA,
Florida to Pennsylvania, our union engaged in the midterm elections big-time.
I was proud to stand with our members as
we knocked on doors, made calls, talked
to our friends and neighbors, and cast our
ballots on behalf of our schools, our kids,
our families, and our communities.
As the results came in on Nov. 4, we
watched as many of the candidates we
worked for lost. It was hard to see but,
upon reflection, not hard to understand.
National elections inevitably turn on
the choices voters make between the
economy and national security, between
hope and fear. This one turned on the
economy, particularly people’s fear and
uncertainty about their future. Despite
the fact there’s been 54 months of private sector job growth, median family
income has fallen during the Obama
presidency, just as it did during both
Bush presidencies and the Carter presidency. As New York Times columnist
David Leonhardt said: “When incomes,
the most tangible manifestation of the
economy for most families, aren’t rising
… Americans don’t feel good about the
state of the country. When they don’t
feel good about the country, they don’t
feel good about the president, and they
tend to punish his party.”
According to exit polls, 63 percent of
voters believe that our economic system
generally favors the wealthy, yet virtually
the same percentage voted with the party
that is known to represent the interests
of the wealthy. Those exit polls also
showed that people want more public
school funding and a higher minimum
wage, yet they voted for candidates that
oppose those things—out of frustration
or a desire for change, or because they felt
the Democrats didn’t have a compelling
economic message or solutions.
While voters want an economy that
works for everyone and not just the
wealthy few, in many of the highly contested races they didn’t believe that those
we endorsed would get them there. They
didn’t see that the candidates we supported were the ones who are in it “for the
nurse on her second shift, for the worker
on the line, for the waitress on her feet,
for the small-business owner, the farmer,
the teacher, the coal miner, the trucker,
the soldier, the veteran,” as Hillary Clinton
famously said in 2008.
It’s critical to remember that, in these
elections, not everything was washed
away. In fact, in places where voters were
given the chance to weigh in directly on
their values, they resoundingly sent a
message that they are on the side of working families and public education. Alaska,
Arkansas, Illinois, Nebraska, and South
Dakota increased the minimum wage.
Massachusetts granted workers paid sick
leave. Missouri rejected an initiative that
would have abolished due process for
teachers.
In California, voters re-elected State
Superintendent of Public Instruction
Tom Torlakson over a candidate backed
heavily by Wall Street interests intent on
gutting teachers’ union rights and worker
protections. In Pennsylvania, anti-education and union-busting Gov. Tom Corbett
lost badly after battling a multiyear community groundswell resisting his attempts
to destroy the state’s public schools.
Poll after poll has shown us that people
actually want public schools. People actually love their teachers. People believe
that a strong public education system
fills an essential role as an anchor of
democracy, a propeller of our economy,
and the vehicle through which we help all
children achieve their dreams.
But we face a new reality where rightwing, anti-worker interests won big, and
their No. 1 target will be unions. We know
their playbook. We know that even though
the labor movement doesn’t have the
density or power by ourselves to change
the trajectory of our economy, we are still
the firewall that thwarts complete control
of our economy and democracy by the
anti-union, free-market ideologues and
oligarchs. And they will do everything in
their power to take us out, dismantle our
infrastructure, divide us from the community, and consolidate their power.
We are going to face some real attacks
and challenges, but we can’t just go into
defensive mode. We faced a lot of these
attacks in 2010, but we didn’t hunker
We must engage more of
our members—because our
members are the union.
down; instead, we were solution-driven
and community-engaged, and we became a stronger union.
We need to think about everything we
do through the lens of whether it’s good
for kids, schools, working families, and
our communities. And our job is to keep
communities and voters with us on the
values, issues, and solutions we share.
We must be solution-driven, by being
willing to solve problems, to innovate
to make things better, to find common
ground when possible, and to engage
in conflict when necessary. We must
connect with our community and make
community our new density. And we
must engage more of our members—
because our members are the union.
The next few years won’t be easy. If
there’s one thing we know, it’s that power
never yields without a fight. To change the
balance of power, we must fight harder
and smarter, and stand together.
We will never stop fighting to reclaim
the promise of an America where, if you
work hard and play by the rules, you can
support your family and ensure that your
children will do better. I think we can all
agree that is a promise worth fighting for.
AMERICAN EDUCATOR | WINTER 2014–2015
1
Download this issue for free at www.aft.org/ae.
VOL. 38, NO. 4 | WINTER 2014–2015
www.aft.org /ae
4
OUR MISSION
Restoring Shanker’s Vision
for Charter Schools
By Richard D. Kahlenberg and Halley Potter
Initially conceived to enable teacher innovation in
educating students from diverse backgrounds,
many charter schools today are a far cry from this
vision. They reduce teacher voice and further
segregation. Because research shows that students
have a greater chance of building knowledge and
skills in schools that empower teachers and
integrate students, charters have the potential to
promote student success, if redirected toward their
original intention.
6
14
Why Teacher Voice Matters
Want to Close the
Achievement Gap?
teachers compared with students
from lower-class families, educators can take steps to ensure that
all students receive support in
managing challenges at school.
Close the Teaching Gap
By Linda Darling-Hammond
An international survey finds that
compared with their counterparts
around the world, U.S. educators
teach in higher-poverty schools,
receive less feedback and support,
have larger class sizes, and spend
more time in the classroom.
19
28 Studying the Ways Students
Get Help with Classwork
By Sarah D. Sparks
32
How Librarians Support
Students and Schools
The Professional Educator
By Joanna Freeman
Pushing Back Against High Stakes
for Students with Disabilities
An elementary school librarian
shares how she collaborates with
classroom teachers, provides
resources for special projects,
and helps students directly.
By Bianca Tanis
A special education teacher
discusses New York state’s toxic
testing environment and explains
why educators must advocate for
high-quality, individualized
assessments.
24
Beyond the Stacks
37
Help-Seekers and
Silent Strugglers
Student Problem-Solving in
Elementary Classrooms
By Jessica Calarco
While research finds that students
from middle-class families tend to
more actively seek help from their
For Grown-Ups Too
The Surprising Depth and
Complexity of Children’s
Literature
By Seth Lerer
A history of children’s literature
recounts the joys of learning
to read and explores how
children—and adults—find
meaning in words that spark
their imagination.
The American Federation of Teachers is
a union of professionals that champions
fairness; democracy; economic
opportunity; and high-quality public
education, healthcare and public
services for our students, their families
and our communities. We are committed
to advancing these principles through
community engagement, organizing,
collective bargaining and political
activism, and especially through the work
our members do.
RANDI WEINGARTEN
President
LORRETTA JOHNSON
Secretary-Treasurer
MARY CATHRYN RICKER
Executive Vice President
AMY M. HIGHTOWER
Editor
JENNIFER DUBIN
Managing Editor
MIKE ROSE
Contributing Writer
JANE FELLER
SEAN LISHANSKY
Copyeditors
LAWRENCE W. MCMAHON
Editorial Assistant
JENNIFER CHANG
Production Manager
MICHELLE FURMAN
Graphic Designer
JENNIFER BERNEY
Production Coordinator
AMERICAN EDUCATOR (ISSN 0148-432X, USPS 008-462)
is published quarterly by the American Federation of
Teachers, 555 New Jersey Ave. NW, Washington, DC
20001-2079. Phone: 202-879-4400. www.aft.org
Letters to the editor may be sent to the address above
or to [email protected].
AMERICAN EDUCATOR cannot assume responsibility for
unsolicited manuscripts.
Please allow a minimum of four weeks for copyright
permission requests.
Signed articles do not necessarily represent the
viewpoints or policies of the AFT.
AMERICAN EDUCATOR is mailed to AFT teacher
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© 2014 AMERICAN FEDERATION OF TEACHERS, AFL-CIO
Cover illustration:
TONYA ENGEL
2
NEWS IN BRIEF
TIME COVER TRIGGERS BACKLASH
A recent cover of Time magazine, which reads, in part, “Rotten
Apples: It’s Nearly Impossible to Fire a Bad Teacher” and shows a
gavel about to smash an apple, is generating anger and activism
among AFT members and the public at large. On Oct. 30, the AFT
delivered a petition with more than 100,000 signatures to Time’s
editors demanding an apology for the magazine’s incendiary treatment of a major educational issue. “This Time cover isn’t trying to
foster a serious dialogue about solutions our schools need—it’s
intentionally creating controversy to sell more copies,” remarked
AFT President Randi Weingarten,
who personally delivered the signa- Parents and teachers were
joined by AFT President
tures. Read more at http://go.aft. Randi Weingarten to
org/AE414news1.
protest Time’s cover.
is aggressively defending the state’s tenure law, which for more than
a century has allowed New York’s educators to advocate for students and has also protected good teachers from arbitrary firing.
Read more at http://go.aft.org/AE414news2.
MORE ON COMMON CORE
A poll from the Gates Foundation and Scholastic suggests that the
Common Core State Standards can work if teachers have the time,
tools, and trust to implement them, and if the standards are
decoupled from the testing fixation. In 2014, teachers are generally enthusiastic about Common Core implementation, but they
are less enthusiastic than last year (68 percent in 2014 vs. 73 percent in 2013). They continue to need support and resources, and
identified as critical instructional materials (86 percent), quality
professional development (84 percent), additional planning time
(78 percent ), and opportunities to collaborate (78 percent). The
survey is available at www.bit.ly/1vomlUD.
PHOTOGRAPH BY BRUCE GILBERT
NOT IN DENIAL
PHILADELPHIA IN TURMOIL
The School District of Philadelphia was thrown into turmoil on Oct.
6, when the state-run School Reform Commission dissolved the
teachers’ contract and cut teachers’ health benefits. The commission’s action came after it failed, during months of contract negotiations, to force teachers to accept big cuts in pay and benefits. On
Oct. 16, an estimated crowd of 3,000 teachers, parents, and students
gathered to voice their opposition outside offices where the commission was scheduled to meet. The Philadelphia Federation of
Teachers moved quickly to secure a temporary injunction until the
courts determine if the commission acted legally. In a joint statement, AFT President Randi Weingarten and AFT Pennsylvania
President Ted Kirsch suggested that the commission was making a
desperate move to improve Gov. Tom Corbett’s sagging poll numbers and dimming hopes for re-election. In fact, Corbett ended up
losing the election to Democrat Tom Wolf. A recent PBS NewsHour
segment available at http://to.pbs.org/1sTBd1P chronicles the
long-standing fight over Philadelphia’s schools.
An estimated 310,000 people converged on Manhattan this fall
for the People’s Climate March—including hundreds of AFT
members, many holding signs that read “Climate Change Is Real.
TEACH SCIENCE.” About 70 labor organizations cosponsored the
event, which attracted three times the number of participants
predicted. “This is a monumental issue for labor,” Frederick Kowal,
president of the United University Professions at the State University of New York and an AFT vice president, said at the rally. Read
more at http://go.aft.org/AE414news3.
PRIZE WINNERS
The AFT this fall announced two first-place winners of the second
annual Prize for Solution-Driven Unionism, a competition among
AFT state and local affiliates to find innovative and collaborative
solutions to tough public problems. The Milwaukee Technical
College Federation, AFT Local 212, won for its solution to lagging
graduation and course completion rates. And the United University
Professions and the New York State Public Employees Federation
won for their successful campaign to save Downstate Medical Center in Brooklyn, New York, from privatization and to promote investment in the facility and expanded healthcare in Brooklyn. The prize,
created in partnership with the Albert
Shanker Institute and the AFT Inno- Weingarten stands with
vation Fund, comes with $25,000 for winners of the union’s
Prize for Solution-Driven
each of the two winners. Read more Unionism at a ceremony in
at http://go.aft.org/AE414news4.
Washington, D.C.
TENURE LAWSUIT
PHOTOGRAPH BY RON AIRA
The New York State United Teachers (NYSUT) has filed a motion to
dismiss the lawsuit challenging the state’s tenure law, arguing the
suit lacks merit and that the plaintiffs’ policy proposals would harm
public education. Former CNN anchor Campbell Brown—whose
Partnership for Educational Justice comprises wealthy and selfproclaimed “education reformers”—has been acting as a spokesperson for the plaintiffs. The motion to dismiss was filed on behalf
of seven individual teachers and NYSUT, the statewide union affiliated with the AFT and the National Education Association. NYSUT
3
Restoring Shanker’s Vision
for Charter Schools
By Richard D. Kahlenberg and Halley Potter
I
ILLUSTRATIONS BY TONYA ENGEL
n 1988, education reformer and American Federation of
Teachers president Albert Shanker proposed a new kind of
public school—“charter schools”—which would allow teachers to experiment with innovative approaches to educating
students. Publicly funded but independently managed, these
schools would be given a charter to try their fresh approaches for
a set period of time and be renewed only if they succeeded.
Richard D. Kahlenberg, a senior fellow at the Century Foundation, is the
author or editor of several books, including Rewarding Strivers: Helping
Low-Income Students Succeed in College; Tough Liberal: Albert Shanker
and the Battles Over Schools, Unions, Race, and Democracy; and All
Together Now: Creating Middle-Class Schools through Public School
Choice. Halley Potter is a fellow at the Century Foundation and a former
charter school teacher. This article is excerpted from Richard D. Kahlenberg
and Halley Potter, A Smarter Charter: Finding What Works for Charter
Schools and Public Education (New York: Teachers College Press).
Reprinted with permission of the publisher. Copyright © 2014 by Richard
D. Kahlenberg and Halley Potter. All rights reserved.
4
Freed from bureaucratic constraints, teachers would be
empowered to draw on their expertise to create educational laboratories from which the traditional public schools would learn.
And liberated from traditional school boundaries, Shanker and
other early charter advocates suggested, charters could do a better
job than the regular public schools of helping children of different
racial, ethnic, economic, and religious backgrounds come together
to learn from one another.
In the past two decades, charter schools have grown by leaps
and bounds, from a single school in Minnesota in 1992 to more
than 6,400 charter schools today, serving more than 2.5 million
students in 42 states. Between the 2012–2013 and 2013–2014
school years, enrollment grew by 13 percent, and seven districts
now have more than 30 percent of public school students enrolled
in charters.1
But somewhere along the way, charter schools went in a very
different direction from the one Shanker originally envisioned.
Many charter school founders empowered management, not
teachers, and adopted antiunion sentiments. Today, just 12
percent of charter schools are unionized, and teacher retention
rates—one possible measure of professional satisfaction—are
much lower than in traditional public schools.2 Moreover, most
charter schools largely discarded the goal of student integration.
Charters are now actually more economically and racially segregated than traditional public schools. The purpose of charter
schools also evolved. Originally conceived as laboratories with
which traditional public schools would collaborate, charters
became a force for competition, with some suggesting they
replace regular district schools.
All in all, the change was quite dramatic. Proposed to empower
teachers, desegregate students, and allow innovation from which
the traditional public schools could learn, many charter schools
instead prized management control, reduced teacher voice, further segregated students, and became competitors, rather than
allies, of regular public schools.
thinking skills in schools where teachers have voice and student
bodies are integrated.*
Moreover, these schools offer a sensible way out of the charter
school wars by rejecting competing visions in which charter schools
are either to be vanquished or completely victorious. On the one
hand, we disagree with charter school opponents, who would simply abandon the experiment entirely. Because of their freedom and
flexibility, charters have the potential to provide excellent learning
environments for students—and many do. Moreover, as a practical
matter, even fierce critics such as Diane Ravitch note that charter
schools are “here to stay.”4 Public support for charters has continued to grow, from 43 percent in 2002 to 68 percent in 2013, according to annual Phi Delta Kappa/Gallup polls.5
On the other hand, we disagree with some charter school
enthusiasts who argue that charters should try to completely
replace the traditional public schools. Despite their enormous
The charter school
movement, once brimming
with tremendous promise,
has lost its way.
The reduced teacher voice and increased segregation might
seem defensible if charter schools were clearly providing a superior form of education to students systemwide. But the best evidence suggests that is not the case. While there are excellent
charter schools and there are also terrible ones, on average, charter
students perform about the same as those in traditional public
schools.3 In our view, the charter school movement, once brimming with tremendous promise, has lost its way.
The good news is that within the varied charter school world,
there are a small but growing number of leaders and institutions
that are resurrecting the original idea behind charters. To document their efforts, we wrote a book from which this article is
drawn. In it, we profile exciting charter schools in California,
Colorado, the District of Columbia, Illinois, Louisiana, Maryland,
Minnesota, New York, Rhode Island, and Wisconsin that promote
teacher voice or economic and racial diversity, or—in a few
cases—do both. To us, these charter schools offer the right
approach because, according to extensive research, students have
a better chance of building deep knowledge and honing critical-
growth, charters still educate only about 5 percent of public school
students. The abiding purpose of charters must be not only to
educate the students under their own roofs but also to bring
lessons to the traditional public schools, which will educate the
vast majority of American students for the foreseeable future.
The relevant question today is no longer whether charter
schools are good or bad as a group. Rather we ask, can charter
schools be taken in a better direction—one that finds inspiration
in the original vision of charters as laboratories for student success
that bring together children from different backgrounds and tap
into the expertise of highly talented teachers?
Shanker’s Original Idea
On March 31, 1988, Shanker, the president of the AFT, rose to
address the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. He shook
*For more about the importance of school integration by socioeconomic status, see
“From All Walks of Life” in the Winter 2012–2013 issue of American Educator,
available at http://go.aft.org/AE-Kahlenberg-Winter1213.
5
the education world with an extraordinary speech in which he
proposed the creation of “a new type of school,”6 which he later
referred to as “charter schools.”
Shanker was frustrated by the way education was being delivered in traditional public schools. Schools were run like factories,
he said, in which students moved at the sound of a bell from class
to class, where teachers lectured to them for hours on end, and
where students were expected to learn in the same way at the same
pace. This system worked fine for about 20 percent of students, said
Shanker. But for the 80 percent of students who didn’t learn well
under that regime, he thought different approaches were needed.
“Can we come up with a plan for a school which doesn’t require
kids to do something that most adults can’t do, which is to sit still
for five or six hours a day listening to somebody talk?”7
In his speech, Shanker proposed a new mechanism by which a
small group of teachers—between six and 12—could come together
with parents and propose the creation of a different type of school.
These teachers would say, “We’ve got an idea. We’ve got a way of
doing something very different. We’ve got a way of reaching the kids
that are now not being reached by what the school is doing.”8
These schools might experiment with team teaching; greater
time set aside for teachers to share ideas; teachers as coaches,
rather than lecturers; programs that allow students to learn at
their own pace; and cooperative learning in which “kids can sit
around a table and help each other just as the kids help each other
on a basketball team”9—ideas that, in those days, were pushing
the envelope.
These schools wouldn’t proclaim to have all the answers. In fact,
Shanker suggested that they should admit this outright—“that we
really do not know just how to reach the 80 percent of these kids …
and that therefore we are engaged in a search.”10 But through experimentation, the new charter laboratory schools might produce
breakthrough lessons about curriculum or pedagogy, which could
then be applied broadly to traditional public schools.
Under Shanker’s program, proposals for charter schools would
be reviewed, evaluated, and approved or rejected by panels that
included union representatives, school board members, and
outsiders. Charters would be schools of choice—no student or
teacher would be compelled to be part of one. And Shanker proposed that the schools be given independence for a five- to
10-year period to prove themselves, because new education ideas
need time to be nurtured and cultivated. In order to make these
new schools successful, he outlined two critical conditions: that
the schools provide their teachers with strong voice, and that the
schools educate kids from all walks of life.
In Shanker’s vision, not only would union representatives be
part of the authorizing board of charter schools, charter school
teachers would be represented by unions, and charter school
Why Teacher Voice Matters
Research shows that when teachers are
engaged in school decisions and collaborate with administrators and each other,
school climate improves. This promotes a
better learning environment for students,
which raises student achievement, and a
better working environment for teachers,
which reduces teacher turnover.
Stronger School Climate. Research finds
a high level of teacher voice has positive
effects on school climate. Richard Ingersoll, an expert on teacher workplace
issues, describes teachers as people “in the
middle,” “caught between the contradictory demands and needs of their superordinates—principals—and their
subordinates—students.”1 When teachers
have the right amount of control, Ingersoll
argues, they are able to do their job
successfully, earning respect from principals, coworkers, and students.
Looking at data from the Department
of Education’s National Center for
Education Statistics Schools and Staffing
Survey, Ingersoll found that as teacher
control in “social decisions” (such as
student discipline and teacher professional
development policies) increases, the
amount of conflict between students and
staff, among teachers, and between
teachers and the principal all decrease.2 As
6
he summarized in a later article, “Schools
in which teachers have more control over
key schoolwide and classroom decisions
have fewer problems with student
misbehavior, show more collegiality and
cooperation among teachers and administrators, have a more committed and
engaged teaching staff, and do a better
job of retaining their teachers.”3
Increased Student Achievement. Not
surprisingly, evidence suggests that having
a strong teacher culture also improves
student performance. Valerie Lee and Julia
Smith measured the effects of teachers’
work conditions and school climate on
student achievement using longitudinal
data tracking individual student learning
gains from eighth to tenth grade.4 They
found that, after controlling for student
and school characteristics, student
achievement is higher across all subjects
when teachers take collective responsibility for student learning and when the staff
is more cooperative. The study also
showed that schools with high levels of
collective responsibility and staff cooperation had more equitable distributions of
student gains across socioeconomic status
(SES)—lower-SES students in these schools
tended to have gains on par with the gains
of higher-SES students. Promoting
collective responsibility and cooperation
among teachers, then, may improve
student outcomes and reduce achievement gaps.
Research on effective school organization also finds that collaboration, which is
one manifestation of teacher voice, is an
important component of school quality.
One prominent recent example is the
impressive 15-year longitudinal study
produced by the Consortium on Chicago
School Research. This study of hundreds of
elementary schools in Chicago found that
one of the organizational features that
distinguished schools showing academic
improvement from struggling schools was
intense staff collaboration coupled with
strong professional development. Furthermore, researchers found that building
strong relational trust among teachers and
administrators was crucial to school
improvement.5 Greg Anrig recently
synthesized research on collaboration and
school organization in his book Beyond
the Education Wars. He found that “one
of the most important ingredients in
successful schools is the inverse of conflict:
intensive collaboration among administrators and teachers, built on a shared sense
of mission and focused on improved
student learning.”6
proposals would include “a plan for faculty decision making.”11
Rather than having a principal walk into a teacher’s classroom
once a year and provide an evaluation, for example, groups of
teachers would work with one another in teams, and if some
weren’t doing their part, the others would hold them accountable.
The idea was consistent with Shanker’s support for peer assistance
and review plans in traditional public schools,* where expert
teachers would try to assist struggling colleagues, and if unsuccessful, recommend termination.12
In charter schools, certain union-negotiated rules could be
bent to encourage innovation. For example, Shanker said, class
size requirements might be waived in order to merge two classes
to allow for team teaching.13 But the basic union structures and
protections should remain in place, he argued. Shanker noted that
traditional school districts that were the most innovative provided
such an environment. “You don’t see these creative things happening where teachers don’t have any voice or power or influence.” Only when teachers feel protected from the whims of
administrators are they willing to take risks.14
In his proposal, Shanker also emphasized the importance of
ensuring that charter schools avoid de facto segregation by race,
*For more about peer assistance and review, see the Fall 2008 issue of American
Educator, available at www.aft.org/ae/fall2008.
Reduced Teacher Turnover. Schools
with high levels of teacher voice also have
less teacher turnover. Ingersoll found that
higher levels of teacher control in social
and instructional areas are associated with
lower teacher turnover rates. Schools with
low levels of teacher control in social
areas had an average turnover rate of 19
percent, compared with just 4 percent for
those with a high level of teacher control
in social areas. A smaller, but still significant, difference in turnover rates was
associated with control in instructional
areas: the turnover rate for schools with a
low level of teacher control in instructional areas was 11 percent, compared
with 7 percent for those with a high level
of teacher control in that area.7
Controlling teacher turnover matters
because excessive turnover consumes
financial resources, disrupts students’
learning, and reduces the number of
highly effective, experienced teachers.
Each time a teacher leaves and must be
replaced, schools face financial costs
associated with advertising and recruitment, special incentives for new hires,
administrative processing, and training for
new employees. A 2007 study of five
districts found that the costs of turnover
varied widely—from around $4,000 per
ethnicity, class, or ability: “We are not talking about a school
where all the advantaged kids or all the white kids or any other
group is segregated to one group. The school would have to reflect
the whole group.”15
Shanker envisioned charters with
the potential to be more integrated.
As schools of choice, they could be
accessible to students from across a
geographic area.
Shanker had long favored integrated schools as a way of promoting both social mobility and social cohesion. Research found,
Shanker noted, “that children from socioeconomically deprived
families do better academically when they are integrated with
children of higher socioeconomic status and better-educated
teacher leaving the Jemez Valley Public
Schools district in New Mexico, to almost
$18,000 per teacher who left Chicago
Public Schools.8 Based on these estimates
and a national average teacher turnover
rate of 12.5 percent, the National
Commission on Teaching and America’s
Future estimates that the overall cost of
teacher turnover in the United States is
$7.34 billion per year.9 In an average
urban district, these costs break down to
$70,000 per school per year to cover the
costs of teachers leaving that school, plus
an additional $8,750 spent to replace each
teacher leaving the district.
Teacher turnover also disrupts the
school community and hurts student
achievement. Research shows that
more-effective teachers are more likely to
stay in teaching,10 so teacher turnover
could theoretically improve student
achievement if less-effective teachers are
replaced with more-effective ones.
However, research on the effects of actual
turnover show that it can have the
opposite effect on student learning. A
study of fourth- and fifth-grade students
in New York City found that students
performed worse when teacher turnover
within their grade-level team was higher.11
The effects were most pronounced for
students in grades where all of the
teachers were new to the school, but
there were also smaller effects observed
for students in grades where some of the
teachers were new hires. Notably, the
harmful effects of teacher turnover were
two to four times greater in schools with
higher proportions of black students and
low-achieving students. In low-achieving
schools, even students with teachers who
had stayed at the school were harmed by
having turnover among other teachers in
the school. This finding suggests that
teacher turnover can have negative
schoolwide effects that extend beyond
individual classrooms.
–R.D.K. and H.P.
Endnotes
1. Richard M. Ingersoll, Who Controls Teachers’ Work? Power and
Accountability in America’s Schools (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2003), 211.
2. Ingersoll, Who Controls Teachers’ Work?
3. Richard M. Ingersoll, “Short on Power, Long on Responsibility,”
Educational Leadership 65, no. 1 (2007): 24.
4. Valerie E. Lee and Julia B. Smith, “Collective Responsibility for
Learning and Its Effects on Gains in Achievement for Early
Secondary School Students,” American Journal of Education 104
(1996): 103–147.
5. Anthony S. Bryk, Penny Bender Sebring, Elaine Allensworth,
Stuart Luppescu, and John Q. Easton, Organizing Schools for
Improvement: Lessons from Chicago (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2010).
(Continued on page 44)
7
families.” He observed, “when children converse, they learn from
each other. Placing a child with a large vocabulary next to one with
a smaller vocabulary can provide a gain to one without a loss to
the other.”16
While, in practice, too many public schools remained racially
and economically segregated in 1988, Shanker envisioned charters with the potential to be more integrated. As schools of choice,
charters, like magnet schools, could be accessible to students from
across a geographic area, rather than limiting enrollment based
on what neighborhood a child’s family could afford to live in, the
way many traditional public schools do.
Four months after his National Press Club speech, Shanker’s
idea won the endorsement of the 3,000 delegates to the AFT convention in San Francisco.17 In the Press Club address, Shanker
didn’t actually employ the term “charter school,” but in a July 1988
“Where We Stand” column, he formally gave the name to his proposal. Drawing upon educator Ray Budde’s report Education by
Charter: Restructuring School Districts,18 Shanker said “charter”
was an appropriate term, noting that “explorers got charters to
seek new lands and resources.”19
Reichgott Junge), a member of the Education Committee. She said
she had never heard of charter schools but was taken by Shanker’s
“visionary” idea to create new schools and empower teachers.
Reichgott Junge, who would go on to author the nation’s first
charter school legislation, was excited by the idea of making teachers feel more invested in schools. She noted that “many teachers
were frustrated with their work environments and were leaving the
profession. I wanted to give them more ownership.”23 At the time, 8
percent of teachers were leaving the profession or retiring every
year.24 Reichgott Junge recalls, “For me, chartering was all about
empowering teachers—giving them the authority to take leadership
as professionals by spearheading and forming new chartered
schools. I felt it was an option for entrepreneurial teachers to break
away from the system—the status quo—and try something new.”25
The idea of charter schools received another boost in November 1988, when the Citizens League, a community policy organization in Minnesota, issued an influential report Chartered
Schools = Choices for Educators + Quality for All Students.26 Like
Shanker, the committee that authored the report argued that
charter schools should be guided by two central tenets: empower-
Many conservatives saw in
charters the potential to
inject greater competition
with public schools, forcing
them to improve.
Conservatives were initially unenthusiastic about Shanker’s
idea of diverse, teacher-led schools that would engage in broad
experimentation. William Kristol, then chief of staff of Ronald
Reagan’s Secretary of Education William Bennett, said that while
the department “didn’t have problems” with the proposal, “we
think there is lots of evidence that traditional methods are working.”20 Assistant Secretary of Education Chester Finn attacked the
charter school proposal, saying it suggested that we did not
already know what works in education.21
But if there was skepticism from the Reagan administration,
policy leaders and influential educators in Minnesota, including
Ted Kolderie and Joe Nathan, were intrigued.22 In October 1988,
Shanker spoke at the Minneapolis Foundation’s Itasca Seminar
about the charter school idea, and among those in attendance was
Democratic-Farmer-Labor state Senator Ember Reichgott (later
8
ing teachers and promoting diversity. The report called first for
“providing cooperative management of schools,” giving teachers
the chance to have greater say over how schools were run.27 The
second goal was “building additional quality through diversity.”28
The report specified that charter schools would enroll students of
all races and achievement levels: “The committee’s vision for
chartered public schools is that they must, like any public school,
serve all children.”29 To promote diversity, the proposal called for
charter schools to employ
outreach programs to inform students, living both inside and
outside the district, from a variety of income levels and races,
about the school, … curricula designed to appeal to students
who would make a diverse student enrollment, … programs
and instructional approaches that encourage the interaction
of students and promote integration, … [and] culturally- and
racially-diverse staff.30
The bottom line, the committee argued, was that “the school’s student enrollment could not be segregated.” Charter schools would
be required to have “an affirmative plan for promoting integration
by ability level and race,” and failing to meet this requirement could
be grounds for revoking the charter.31
But in a notable departure from Shanker’s vision—and a hint
of things to come—the report left the door open for minorityoriented schools. “Although these criteria would prohibit the
establishment of schools designed for any single racial or ethnic
group, the committee appreciates the complexity of this issue and
suggests that the Legislature might wish to deal separately with
voluntarily segregated schools established by minority groups.”32
In addition, the report suggested that schools for academically
at-risk students could be allowed as an exception to the policy
that otherwise prohibits charters from screening students based
on achievement level.
Overall, though, the report said that integrated schools should
be the norm. “Rather than roll back the gains made by desegregation over the last generation, or settle for that achievement, we
should expand the commitment to go further, to do more.”33 And
in a twist, the proposal also highlighted the importance of economic integration: “Although desegregation rules focus exclusively on students’ race or ethnic background, family income
levels better determine children’s preparation for school and
academic success.” The committee suggested, therefore, that we
should “be at least as concerned about segregation by income as
segregation by race.”34
In 1990, the charter idea gained further prominence after the
state legislature in neighboring Wisconsin passed the nation’s first
private school voucher law, providing public support for lowincome Milwaukee students to attend private and parochial
schools. The argument, advanced by black Democratic legislator
Polly Williams, was that low-income black students deserved something better than the dysfunctional urban schools to which they
were assigned. This development gave another reason for progressives to back charter schools: as an alternative to vouchers. Charters
were a choice option that avoided the concerns posed by vouchers—entanglement of church and state and a lack of accountability
for public dollars. Ted Kolderie, former director of the Citizens
League and member of the committee that authored its Chartered
Schools report, noted the news from Milwaukee. He argued in a
November 1990 paper for the Progressive Policy Institute, a Washington, D.C., think tank associated with the Democratic Leadership
Council, that charters were a way to strengthen public education,
not abandon it. Again, teacher empowerment was a core idea of the
Progressive Policy Institute report. Kolderie wrote that charter
schools could provide nothing less than “the opportunity for teachers to own and run the new schools.”35
As outlined by Shanker, Reichgott Junge, the Citizens League,
and Kolderie, then, the original vision of charter schools rested on
three pillars:
1. This new type of school should be allowed to experiment with
desperately needed new approaches to reach students,
approaches from which the traditional public schools could
learn.
2. Charter schools would provide an enhanced level of teacher
voice and teacher empowerment compared with the public
schools, which saw large levels of teacher frustration and
turnover.
3. Charters, by severing the tie between residential neighborhood
segregation and school segregation, might help reinvent the old
idea of the American common school, where students of different races, incomes, and religions could come and learn together
under a single schoolhouse roof.
These were the animating ideas behind the exciting new proposal for charter schools. But the question remained: Once the idea
was written into legislation, how faithfully would these principles
be honored in practice?
The Development of a More Conservative Vision
In 1991, Minnesota became the nation’s first state to adopt charter
school legislation—and, with it, came the first significant deviation
from Shanker’s original vision. Over the years, Minnesota teachers
had fought hard to ensure that educators, like lawyers, doctors, and
architects, had to pass certification requirements in order to enter
the profession. They also fought to ensure that teachers were supported and protected by democratically elected union representatives who could bargain collectively on their behalf.
When Ember Reichgott Junge’s charter school legislation was
introduced in the Minnesota state legislature, however, it failed
to include either universal teacher certification requirements or
automatic collective bargaining rights for teachers. If enhancing
teacher voice was a central tenet of the charter school idea, why,
teachers asked, would the charter legislation strip teachers of the
protections of the district contract? The Minnesota Federation of
Teachers strongly opposed the legislation on licensure and collective bargaining grounds.36
In addition, Minnesota’s charter law did nothing to prevent the
creation of charter schools aimed at particular ethnic and racial
minority groups, something Shanker found fundamentally at
odds with the very idea of public education in America. Over time,
Minnesota would come to host some 30 charter schools focused
on students from specific ethnic or immigrant groups, such as
Somali, Ethiopian, Hmong, and Latino populations.37
The new, more conservative charter vision, which promoted
neither teacher voice nor school integration, quickly swept the
country. Democratic President Bill Clinton, elected in 1992,
became a strong supporter of charter schools and pushed for
federal seed money to promote them. Following Minnesota’s
adoption of the nation’s first charter school law in 1991, state
legislation was introduced and passed in capital after capital. By
2014, there were 6,400 charter schools in 42 states and the District
of Columbia.38
As states began enacting charter school legislation, the departure from Shanker’s vision was repeated over and over again in the
three critical areas: collaborating with traditional public schools,
empowering teachers, and integrating students. As the original
goals of charter schools were upended, conservatives like the Reagan administration’s Chester Finn came to support charters. And,
in a stunning reversal, Shanker came to oppose most of them.39
Below, we outline how this remarkable transformation
occurred on those three critical questions: (1) whether charters
9
would cooperate with regular public schools or serve as competitors, (2) whether they would enhance teacher voice or increase
management authority, and (3) whether they would promote
diversity or cater to niche markets.
Cooperative Laboratories versus Competitors
Whereas Shanker emphasized the way in which charter schools
could serve as a laboratory for testing ideas that could improve
public schools, many conservatives saw in charters the potential
to inject greater competition with public schools, forcing them
to improve. The model was similar to the argument advanced by
conservative supporters of private school vouchers: that competitive pressures of charters would compel regular public
schools to do better. James Goenner, president and CEO of the
National Charter Schools Institute, for example, suggested in
1996 that “charter schools are a vehicle for infusing competition
and market forces into public education, a proven method for
responsive change and improvement.”40
As charter school legislation was passed in state after state,
the competition rationale grew in strength. Indeed, in a 2013
examination of charter school laws, researchers found the most
popular purpose cited in state law for charter schools was to
provide competition.41 The triumph of the market rationale over
the laboratory theory also helps explain why more than 80 percent of states with charter school laws allow public funds to go
to private, for-profit charter operators.42
Some charter school advocates went further on the competition question and argued that charters should not merely serve
as a spur to improve public schools but that, in the long run, the
charter schools should replace the traditional public school system entirely. Hugh Price, president of the National Urban League,
suggested in 1999 that we “charterize” all urban schools. In 2009,
Tom Vander Ark, former education director at the Bill and Melinda
Gates Foundation, removed Price’s urban qualifier to suggest, “All
schools should be charter schools.” And in 2013, U.S. Senator
Lamar Alexander (R-TN), the former U.S. secretary of education,
said, “I still wonder why we, over time, don’t make every public
school a charter school.” He continued, “You couldn’t do it all
overnight, but you could do it over 20, 25 years.” 43 In New
Orleans—where roughly 90 percent of public school students
attended charter schools in 2013–2014, compared to less than 5
percent in 2004–200544—U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan
was so enthusiastic that he called Hurricane Katrina “the best
thing that happened to the education system in New Orleans.”45
Along with the shift in goals, the public policy rhetoric
changed from an emphasis on how charters could best serve as
laboratory partners to public schools, to whether charters as a
group are “better” or “worse” than traditional public schools.
Tellingly, a growing number of studies were conducted to determine not what lessons could be learned from charters but
whether charters outperform or underperform traditional public
schools.
Over time, the market metaphor came to replace the laboratory
metaphor. As Peter Cookson and Kristina Berger observed in
2002, “Much of the charter movement is rooted in the same
assumptions and philosophy that [voucher advocates John]
Chubb and [Terry] Moe use to support their belief that the American public school system should be transformed into a market-
10
based ‘economy’ that forces autonomous, publicly funded schools
to compete for students.”46
Meanwhile, given the adversarial and competitive environment in which charters and traditional public schools found
themselves, there was precious little evidence that the two sets
of institutions were actively cooperating to share best practices.
As Scott D. Pearson of the U.S. Department of Education’s charter school program noted in 2010, while “one of the promises of
charter schools was they were going to be a source of innovation
and be a benefit not only for the children attending charter
schools, but [for] all public schools, … [in practice], … the collaboration is not as widespread as we would hope.”47 Originally
viewed as “isolated laboratories of innovation,” charter schools
came to be seen by many as a replacement for traditional public
schools and “charter-school expansion as a solution itself.”48
Enhancing Teacher Voice versus
Increasing Management Authority
The second dramatic shift in the charter school vision came in the
critical area of teacher voice (for more on teacher voice, see the
sidebar on page 6). In state after state, charter legislation followed
the Minnesota model of failing to provide all charter teachers
automatic collective bargaining rights similar to those enjoyed by
regular public school teachers. (Today, just five of 42 states with
charter school laws require charter school teachers to be covered
by the district collective bargaining agreement.)49
In theory, many state laws provided for the possibility of organizing charters on a school-by-school basis, but given the expense of
unionizing a small number of teachers, few unionizing efforts have
been made. Overall, teachers in just 12 percent of charter schools
are unionized.50 By contrast, 60 percent of public school districts
have an agreement with a union, and more than three-quarters of
teachers nationwide are members of teacher unions.51 States did
not offer a sensible middle ground in which teachers would, upon
the creation of a new charter school, have the automatic opportunity to vote on whether to form a union and create a contract that
would be tailored to the individual needs of their school.
Over time, conservative charter school advocates argued that
having a nonunion environment in charter schools was a key
advantage—perhaps the defining advantage—over regular public
schools. Finn, initially skeptical of the charter idea, came to champion them, arguing that “the single most important form of freedom for charter schools is to hire and fire employees as they like
and pay them as they see fit.”52
Union supporters responded that under collective bargaining
agreements in traditional public schools, it is possible to fire
teachers, so long as due process is provided; and many unions in
district public school systems have embraced performance pay.
But conservatives in the business world, politics, and the finance
and philanthropic communities saw charters as an attractive
vehicle for circumventing teacher unions, organizations they see
as harmful to children. Republican Steve Forbes, for example,
wrote an editorial in 2009 praising the results of New York City
charter schools that are “not burdened with the mind-numbing,
effectiveness-killing bureaucratic and union restrictions.” In the
same year, Jeanne Allen, then executive director of the Center for
Education Reform, flatly argued, “A union contract is actually at
odds with a charter school.”53
Promoting Diversity versus Catering
to Niche Markets
The third and final major evolution away from Shanker’s original
vision came in the realm of student diversity. Shanker believed
having separate schools by race and class was inherently undemocratic, and he and some other early charter school backers saw
charters as a way of breaking down segregation. That priority is
evidenced in many early charter school laws, particularly those
passed in the early to mid-1990s in states like Wisconsin, Hawaii,
Kansas, and Rhode Island, which required all charter schools to
take positive steps to promote diversity. According to a 2009
ity matters more. When confronted by research finding higher
levels of racial and economic segregation in charter schools, for
example, Nelson Smith, then president and chief executive of the
National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, said, “We actually
are very proud of the fact that charter schools enroll more lowincome kids and more kids of color than do other public schools.”
He continued: “The real civil rights issue for many of these kids is
being trapped in dysfunctional schools.”56
Two arguments were advanced for targeting low-income,
minority, and immigrant groups in racially and economically
isolated charter schools: the need to maximize bang for the edu-
In state after state,
charter legislation failed
to provide all charter
teachers automatic
collective bargaining
rights.
analysis by Erica Frankenberg and Genevieve Siegel-Hawley, 16
states had laws that permit or require charter schools to employ
positive steps to bring about greater levels of racial and/or socioeconomic diversity.54
But over time, concerns about diversity have often been
eclipsed by efforts—well-meaning in nature, to be sure—that
have the effect of concentrating minority and low-income students in racially and economically isolated charter schools.
Rather than emphasizing diversity and the possibility for breaking down segregation, charter school supporters began advocating for schools to target members of minority and low-income
groups, who are demonstrably in need of better schools. According to a 2010 study by the Civil Rights Project, for example, almost
half of low-income students in charter schools attended schools
where more than 75 percent of students were low income, compared with about a third of low-income students in traditional
public schools. In addition, 36 percent of all students in charter
schools attended schools where 90 percent or more of students
were from minority households, compared with 16 percent of all
students in regular public schools.55
How did a policy that began with the idea of promoting diversity end up exacerbating racial and economic concentrations?
Fundamentally, charter school advocates suggested, integration
and school quality are unrelated and distinct priorities, and qual-
cational buck, and the belief that the special needs of these communities could be better addressed in concentrated settings.
Charter school operators, who are in the business because they
believe they can do a better job of educating students than the
regular public schools, argue they sought to bring the benefits of
their schools to the students most in need. Under this view, the
best way to help at-risk students and close the achievement gap
is to prioritize low-income and minority students. Given scarce
federal, state, and philanthropic dollars, funding a racially and
economically integrated school that includes not only substantial
numbers of low-income and minority students but also substantial numbers of middle-class and white students may be seen as
diluting funding for at-risk students. Based on similar logic, charter school authorizers—the various state, local, or independent
agencies charged with approving new charter schools, monitoring their progress, renewing charters for successful schools, and
closing schools that fail to meet performance requirements—may
favor high-poverty charter schools. Authorizers may choose to
prioritize applications for schools located in the areas with the
fewest high-quality educational opportunities, which are often
communities with concentrated poverty.
Advocates of low-income charter schools further suggest that
disadvantaged students need a different set of pedagogical
approaches than middle-class students. Highly routinized, “no
11
excuses” schools set rigorous academic standards but also
emphasize “noncognitive skills,” such as self-discipline, and seek
to develop an all-encompassing school climate to combat the
culture of poverty from which their students come. Paul Tough,
author of a book about the Harlem Children’s Zone, describes the
philosophy behind “no excuses” secondary schools that target
at-risk students: “The schools reject the notion that all that these
struggling students need are high expectations; they do need
bathroom at prayer time the way she might have in an integrated
school. Likewise, Jewish advocates have called for the creation of
Hebrew language schools to “strengthen Jewish communal
identity.”61
Proponents of charter schools that are self-segregated argue
that they are qualitatively different from the segregated schools
of the past because they are the product of acts of volition on the
part of racial, ethnic, or religious minorities. Bill Wilson, an Afri-
When schools diminish
teacher voice or enroll
segregated student bodies,
students miss out on
important benefits.
those, of course, but they also need specific types and amounts of
instruction, both in academics and attitude, to compensate for
everything they did not receive in their first decade of life.”57
Journalist David Whitman suggests that highly effective highpoverty schools often employ a “paternalistic” approach specifically tailored to low-income students. He says they teach
students
not just how to think, but also how to act according to what are
commonly termed traditional, middle-class values. These
paternalistic schools go beyond just teaching values as abstractions: the schools tell students exactly how they are expected
to behave, and their behavior is closely monitored, with real
rewards for compliance and penalties for noncompliance.58
Similar arguments are made on behalf of charter schools that
cater to targeted immigrant populations. Educator Joe Nathan,
for example, supports a pair of charter schools in the Twin Cities
that educate mostly Somali and Oromo students, because the
schools provide a space where children can retain their home
language and knowledge of their home culture.59 Likewise, Letitia
Basford’s qualitative study of Somali youth concluded that
“attending a culturally specific charter school promotes positive
intercultural competence in which students are able to build a
good self-concept and find comfort in who they are as East African
immigrants, as Muslims, and as American citizens.”60 One student
told Basford that in a charter school in which 100 percent of students are Muslim, she did not feel embarrassed running to the
12
can American advocate who grew up attending segregated public
schools in Indiana, notes, “We had no choice. I was forced to
attend an inferior school, farther from home than nearby, betterfunded ‘Whites-only’ schools. Higher Ground [a racially isolated
charter school] is open to all. No one is forced to attend. Quite a
difference.”62
Among the most influential actors in the charter school
world—state legislators—the idea of catering to niche markets
has, over time, generally trumped the original emphasis on creating schools that promote diversity and reinforce the American
common school ideal. Laws in roughly a dozen states, including
Illinois, North Carolina, and Virginia, prioritize charter school
funding for at-risk or low-income students or, in Connecticut’s
case, students in districts in which members of racial or ethnic
minorities constitute 75 percent or more of enrolled students.
Other state laws restrict attendance zones for charter schools,
making it more difficult for charters to attract a diverse population
from a wide geographic area.63 And even state laws that require
charter schools to mirror local demographics could end up concentrating poverty. For example, a 2010 New York state charter
school law requiring charter schools to mimic the demographics
of the surrounding neighborhood—implemented to address gaps
in English language learner and special education enrollment at
charter schools—might mean, if enforced, that a school in upper
Manhattan’s District 6 would need to enroll a student population
in which 98 percent are eligible for free or reduced-price lunch, a
commonly used measure of low-income status.64
Likewise, the other key players in funding charter schools—
philanthropists—often prioritize education projects in highpoverty locations, providing incentives for charter school creators
to maximize the proportion of low-income students in a school
in order to gain funding. The Walton Family Foundation, for
example, focuses specifically on selected “Market Share Demonstration Sites,” which are all districts with high concentrations of
low-income students,65 and the Broad Foundation focuses generally on urban school districts.66 Some of the charter school chains
that have received the most generous philanthropic support pride
themselves on their ability to educate pupils in schools with high
concentrations of low-income and/or minority students. KIPP
schools, for example, boast that “more than 86 percent of our
students are from low-income families and eligible for the federal
free and reduced-price meals program, and 95 percent are African
American or Latino.”67
Rick Hess of the conservative American Enterprise Institute
notes the trend among foundations to support charter schools
“that have the highest octane mix of poor and minority kids” and
outlines how that priority can work at cross-purposes with integration. He wrote in 2011, “The upshot is that it is terribly difficult
to generate interest in nurturing racially or socioeconomically
integrated schools, even though just about every observer thinks
that more such schools would be good for kids, communities, and
the country.”68
B
efore his death in 1997, Shanker watched with growing
dismay as his idea morphed into something quite different. To begin with, Shanker was disturbed that the
market-driven charter school rationale led some states
to allow private, for-profit corporations to enter the charter school
business. For-profit companies, he warned, would inevitably put
shareholder interests before educating children, and “vouchers,
charter schools, for-profit management schemes are all quick fixes
that won’t fix anything.”69
At base, Shanker suggested, the charter school experiment was
not working. In a meeting sponsored by the Pew Forum in 1996, he
suggested, “In the charter schools we now have, there is no record
with respect to achievement or meeting standards.” But Shanker
wasn’t willing to throw in the towel entirely. In the 1996 AFT executive council meeting, he suggested it was time to separate the wheat
from the chaff. He said the AFT should “put out a careful analysis
of the range of types of charter schools and what’s good and what’s
bad about different provisions in them and how they work.” Such
an analysis “could have a tremendous impact on influencing good
legislation and getting rid of lousy legislation.”70
The current thrust of the charter school sector, toward nonunion workplaces and segregated schools, is troubling for at least
two reasons. First and foremost, it is bad for kids. Having vibrant
teacher voice can help build a strong school climate and increase
student achievement. Likewise, students in socioeconomically
and racially diverse schools have shown greater academic achievement and social awareness than peers in more homogeneous settings. When schools diminish teacher voice or enroll segregated
student bodies, students miss out on these important benefits.
Second, it is unimaginative. If comparing all charter schools to
all district schools is “like asking whether eating out is better than
eating at home,”71 then concentrating resources into the propaga-
tion of nonunionized, segregated charter schools is like going to a
buffet and only eating the dinner rolls.
Charter schools should start with big dreams, creative ideas, and
experimentation—not repetition of one mediocre model. Why not
try to increase socioeconomic and racial school integration through
such schools? Why not use them to rethink traditional notions of
teacher voice?
Changes to federal, state, and local policy, as well as increased
private support, can help encourage innovation in charter schools
around these two issues. But there is room to grow even before
structural changes take place. We have blueprints to follow in the
form of existing charter schools that empower teachers through
unions, as well as those that integrate students from diverse socioeconomic, racial, and ethnic backgrounds.
Shanker’s ideas for charter schools, formulated more than two
decades ago, turn out to be a powerful vision for educational innovation in a new century. Charter schools can address the educational demands of a 21st-century society by giving students the
chance to work with a diverse group of peers and treating teachers
as 21st-century professionals engaged in collaboration, critical
thinking, and problem solving. Teacher voice and student diversity,
largely forgotten goals from the earliest ideas about charter schools,
may hold the best hope for improving charter schools—and thereby
illuminate a path for strengthening our entire system of public
education.
☐
Endnotes
1. National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, A Growing Movement: America’s Largest
Charter School Communities, 8th annual ed. (Washington, DC: National Alliance for Public
Charter Schools, 2013); and National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, Estimated Number of
Public Charter Schools and Students, 2013–2014 (Washington, DC: National Alliance for Public
Charter Schools, 2014).
2. “Unionized Charter Schools: Dashboard Data from 2009–10,” National Alliance for Public
Charter Schools, November 3, 2011, www.publiccharters.org/publications/unionized-charterschools-dashboard-data-2009-10; and David A. Stuit and Thomas M. Smith, “Explaining the
Gap in Charter and Traditional Public School Teacher Turnover Rates,” in “Charter Schools,”
ed. Eugenia Toma and Ron Zimmer, special issue, Economics of Education Review 31, no. 2
(2012): 268–279. A more recent study suggests that charter schools have moved even further
from the ideal than Shanker envisioned, finding that the share of unionized charters has
dropped to 7 percent. See Arianna Prothero, “Why More Charter Schools Aren’t Unionized,”
Charters & Choice (blog), Education Week, September 18, 2014, http://blogs.edweek.org/
edweek/charterschoice/2014/09/why_more_charter_schools_arent_unionized.html.
3. See, for example, Center for Research on Education Outcomes, National Charter School
Study 2013 (Stanford, CA: Center for Research on Education Outcomes, 2013); and Philip
Gleason, Melissa Clark, Christina Clark Tuttle, and Emily Dwoyer, The Evaluation of Charter
School Impacts: Final Report (Washington, DC: National Center for Education Evaluation and
Regional Assistance, 2010).
4. Diane Ravitch, Reign of Error: The Hoax of the Privatization Movement and the Danger to
America’s Public Schools (New York: Knopf, 2013), 252.
5. William J. Bushaw and Shane J. Lopez, “Which Way Do We Go? The 45th Annual PDK/
Gallup Poll of the Public’s Attitudes toward the Public Schools,” Phi Delta Kappan 95, no. 1
(2013): 9–25; and Lowell C. Rose and Alec M. Gallup, “Urban Dwellers on Urban Schools,” Phi
Delta Kappan 84, no. 5 (2003): 408–409.
6. Albert Shanker, “National Press Club Speech,” March 31, 1988, Walter P. Reuther Library,
http://reuther.wayne.edu/files/64.43.pdf, 11.
7. Shanker, “National Press Club Speech,” 14.
12. Richard D. Kahlenberg, Tough Liberal: Albert Shanker and the Battles over Schools, Unions,
Race, and Democracy (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 282–288.
13. Edward B. Fiske, “Lessons,” New York Times, January 4, 1989.
16. Albert Shanker, quoted in Kahlenberg, Tough Liberal, 84–85.
17. Kahlenberg, Tough Liberal, 312.
18. Ray Budde, Education by Charter: Restructuring School Districts (Andover, MA: Regional
(Continued on page 44)
13
Want to Close
the Achievement Gap?
Close the Teaching Gap
By Linda Darling-Hammond
F
ILLUSTRATIONS BY PAUL ZWOLAK
or years now, educators have looked to international tests
as a yardstick to measure how well students from the
United States are learning compared with their peers. The
answer has been: not so well. The United States has been
falling further behind other nations and has struggled with a large
achievement gap.
Federal policy under No Child Left Behind (NCLB) and the U.S.
Department of Education’s “flexibility” waivers has sought to
address this problem by beefing up testing policies—requiring
more tests and upping the consequences for poor results, includ-
Linda Darling-Hammond is the Charles E. Ducommun Professor of Education at Stanford University, where she is the faculty director of the Stanford
Center for Opportunity Policy in Education and the founding director of
the School Redesign Network. She is a former president of the American
Educational Research Association and a member of the National Academy
of Education. A version of this article first appeared in the Huffington Post
on June 30, 2014, and is available at www.huffingtonpost.com/linda
darlinghammond/to-close-the-achievement_b_5542614.html.
14
ing denying diplomas to students, firing teachers, and closing
schools. Unfortunately, this strategy has not worked. In fact, U.S.
performance on the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), conducted by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), declined in every subject area
between 2000 and 2012—the years in which these policies have
been in effect.
Now we have international evidence about something that has
a greater effect on learning than testing: teaching. The results of
the Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS),1 released
this past summer by the OECD, offer a stunning picture of the
challenges experienced by American teachers, while providing
provocative insights into what we might do to foster better teaching—and learning—in the United States.
In short, the survey shows that American teachers today work
harder under much more challenging conditions than teachers
elsewhere in the industrialized world. They also receive lessuseful feedback, receive less-helpful professional development,
and have less time to collaborate to improve their work. Not surprisingly, two-thirds feel their profession is not valued by soci-
ety—an indicator that the OECD finds is ultimately related to
student achievement.
Though it has been conducted since 2008, 2013 was the first
time the United States participated in TALIS, which surveyed
more than 100,000 lower secondary school teachers and school
leaders in 34 jurisdictions worldwide. Although U.S. participation
rates fell just below the minimum for full inclusion in the comparative report, the OECD prepared a U.S. country report. These
data tell an important story.
U.S. Teachers Face More Poverty,
Larger Class Sizes, Longer Days
Nearly two-thirds of U.S. middle school teachers work in schools
where more than 30 percent of students are economically disadvantaged (see Figure 1). This is by far the highest rate in the
world and more than triple the average TALIS rate. The next
countries in line after the United States are Malaysia and Chile.
Ignored by our current education policies are the facts that
nearly one in four American children lives below the poverty line
and a growing number are homeless,2 without regular access to
food or healthcare, and stressed by violence and drug abuse
around them. Educators now spend a great deal of their time
trying to help children and their families manage these issues,3
while they also seek to close skill gaps and promote learning.
Along with these challenges, U.S. teachers must cope with
American teachers work harder
under much more challenging
conditions than teachers elsewhere
in the industrialized world.
Figure 1. Higher Student Poverty
TALIS asked principals in lower secondary education (roughly the equivalent of middle school in the United States) about various characteristics
of their schools, including the percentage of students from disadvantaged homes. As shown in the map below, 64.5 percent of middle school
teachers in the United States work in schools where principals report that more than 30 percent of students are socioeconomically disadvantaged—
the highest reported percentage among all TALIS participants. The TALIS global average is 19.6 percent.
England
(United Kingdom)
3.1%
24.4%
5.8%
9.5%
Alberta
(Canada)
Italy
Japan
8.5%
South Korea
20.3%
64.5%
Mexico
Finland
United States
44.2%
Singapore
6.4%
57.9%
Malaysia
26%
40.4%
Chile
Australia
Brazil
54.6%
TALIS global average: 19.6%
SOURCE: OECD, RESULTS FROM TALIS 2013: UNITED STATES OF AMERICA COUNTRY NOTE (PARIS: OECD, 2014), 16.
15
larger class sizes (27 students per class versus the TALIS average
of 24). As shown in Figures 2 and 3, they also report spending
many more hours than teachers in any other country directly
instructing children each week (27 hours per week versus the
TALIS average of 19). And they work more hours in total each week
than their global counterparts (45 hours per week versus the
TALIS average of 38), with less time in their schedules for planning, collaboration, and professional development. This schedule—a leftover from factory-model school designs of the early
1900s4—makes it harder for our teachers to find time to work with
their colleagues on creating great curriculum and learning new
methods, to mark papers, to work individually with students, and
to reach out to parents.
Partly because of the lack of time to observe and work with one
another, U.S. teachers report receiving much less feedback from
their peers than do their counterparts in other countries (see
Figures 4 and 5), which research shows is the most useful tool for
improving practice.5 They also report receiving less-useful professional development than their global counterparts. One reason
for this, according to our own Schools and Staffing Survey conducted by the Department of Education, is that, during the NCLB
era, more-sustained learning opportunities reverted back to the
one-shot, top-down, “drive-by” workshops that are least useful
for improving practice.6
Figure 2. Longer Hours for Teachers
Middle school teachers in the United States report working 45
hours per week—nearly 20 percent longer than the average
reported by middle school teachers in other countries.
U.S. teachers report
working 45 hours
per week.
Internationally, the
average is 38 hours
per week.
SOURCE: OECD, RESULTS FROM TALIS 2013: UNITED STATES OF AMERICA COUNTRY NOTE (PARIS: OECD,
2014), 12.
Policy Implications
The picture is very different in countries that rank highly both in
the TALIS survey and in student achievement on international
tests. Here are some policy lessons we can learn from these highachieving nations:
Address inequities that undermine learning: Every international indicator shows that the United States supports its children
less well than do other developed countries, which offer universal
healthcare and early childhood education, as well as income supports for families. Evidence is plentiful that when children are
healthy and well-supported in learning in the early years and
beyond, they achieve and graduate at higher rates.7 The latest PISA
report also found that the most successful nations allocate pro-
16
Higher-performing countries
intentionally focus on creating
teacher collaboration that results
in more skillful teaching and
strong student achievement.
portionately more resources to the education of disadvantaged
students, while the United States allocates less.
It is time for the United States finally to equalize school funding, address childhood poverty as it successfully did during the
1970s, institute universal early care and learning programs, and
provide the wraparound services—healthcare, before- and afterschool care, and social services—that ensure children are supported to learn. A bill introduced in Congress this past summer
by Senators Jack Reed (D-RI) and Sherrod Brown (D-OH),8 with
a companion bill introduced by Representative Marcia Fudge
(D-OH)—the Core Opportunity Resources for Equity and Excellence Act9—would make headway on the school resource issues
that are essential for progress.
Value teaching and teacher learning: Countries where teachers believe their profession is valued show higher levels of student
achievement. Nations that value teaching invest more in highquality professional learning—paying the full freight for initial
preparation and ongoing professional development, so that
teachers can continually become more capable. OECD data show
that these countries also pay teachers as well as they pay other
college-educated workers, while U.S. teachers earn only 60 percent of the average college graduate’s wage and receive little support for their learning.10 To recruit and retain top talent and enable
teachers to help all children learn, we must make teaching an
attractive profession that advances in knowledge and skill, like
medicine and engineering.
Redesign schools to create time for collaboration: OECD
studies show that higher-performing countries intentionally focus
on creating teacher collaboration that results in more skillful
teaching and strong student achievement. U.S. researchers have
also found that school achievement is much stronger where
teachers work in collaborative teams that plan and learn together.
Teachers repeatedly confirm that opportunities to work with their
colleagues often determine where they are willing to work.11
Collaboration, however, requires time as well as the will to
make it happen, and this means that school staffing and schedules must be designed differently. The TALIS data show that U.S.
schools generally hire many fewer teachers than schools in other
countries. We need to rethink how we invest in and organize
schools, so that time for extended professional learning and collaboration become the norm rather than the exception.
Create meaningful teacher evaluations that foster
improvement: All U.S. teachers stated that formal evaluation is
used in their schools, based on classroom observations; feedback from parents, guardians, and students; and review of test
information. This is not very different from the TALIS average.
What is different is the nature of the feedback and its usefulness.
American teachers found the feedback they received to be less
useful for improving instruction than their peers elsewhere
found. Interestingly, as shown in Figures 4 and 5, U.S. teachers
received much more of their feedback from busy principals (85
percent versus the TALIS average of 54 percent) and much less
from other teachers (27 percent versus the TALIS average of 42
percent), who can generally offer more targeted insights about
how to teach specific curriculum concepts and students.
In addition, the feedback from test data is different across
countries. Most tests in other countries are open-ended mea-
U.S. teachers receive much more
feedback from busy principals and
much less from other teachers,
who can offer more targeted
insights about how to teach.
Figure 3. More Time Teaching
The map below shows the number of hours middle school teachers report teaching class. The U.S. average is 26.8 hours per week, while the
TALIS average is substantially lower, at 19.3.
England
(United Kingdom)
20.6
17.3
Alberta
(Canada)
17.7
Italy
Japan
18.8
South Korea
26.4
26.8
Mexico
Finland
19.6
United States
22.7
Singapore
17.1
17.1
Malaysia
18.6
25.4
Chile
Australia
Brazil
26.7
TALIS global average: 19.3 hours
17
U.S. TEACHERS REPORT MOST FEEDBACK FROM PRINCIPALS, LITTLE FEEDBACK FROM PEERS
TALIS asked middle school teachers about receiving feedback on instruction. The chart on the left (Figure 4) refers to the percentage who
report receiving feedback from principals, while the chart on the right (Figure 5) shows those reporting feedback from other teachers. In the
United States, teachers report that receiving feedback from principals is three times more common than receiving feedback from peers. In
most countries, teachers report more of a balance.
Figure 5. Feedback from Peers
Figure 4. Feedback from Principals
United States
South Korea
Alberta (Canada)
England (United Kingdom)
Japan
Australia
Mexico
Japan
Brazil
Finland
TALIS average
Singapore
Singapore
TALIS average
Malaysia
Italy
Finland
Alberta (Canada)
England (United Kingdom)
Mexico
Chile
Malaysia
South Korea
Brazil
Italy
United States
Australia
Chile
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
80
90
100
Percentage of teachers reporting this type of feedback
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
80
90
100
Percentage of teachers reporting this type of feedback
sures scored by teachers, usually internal to the classroom or,
occasionally, standardized across schools (typically in one or
two grade levels). The United States is the only country in which
students are tested annually with external, multiple-choice
standardized tests, with scores reduced to a value-added metric
assigned to teachers.12 Aside from the wide error range found to
be associated with these metrics, 13 they offer no information
about what students actually did, said, or thought that could help
teachers improve their practice. A more meaningful system
would use classroom data and feedback from peers and principals in ways that are much more focused on how to teach specific
content to particular students.
W
e cannot make major headway in raising student
performance and closing the achievement gap
until we make progress in closing the teaching
gap. That means supporting children equitably
outside as well as inside the classroom, creating a profession that
is rewarding and well-supported, and designing schools that
offer the conditions for both the student and the teacher learning
that will move American education forward.
☐
Endnotes
1. Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, TALIS 2013 Results: An
International Perspective on Teaching and Learning (Paris: OECD, 2014).
18
2. “Selected Economic Characteristics,” in U.S. Census Bureau, 2013 American Community
Survey 1-Year Estimates, table DP03; and Roy Grant, Delaney Gracy, Grifin Goldsmith, Alan
Shapiro, and Irwin E. Redlener, “Twenty-Five Years of Child and Family Homelessness: Where
Are We Now?,” in “Homelessness and Public Health,” supplement, American Journal of Public
Health 103, no. S2 (2013): e1–e10.
3. Prudence L. Carter and Kevin G. Welner, eds., Closing the Opportunity Gap: What America
Must Do to Give Every Child an Even Chance (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013).
4. Linda Darling-Hammond, The Flat World and Education: How America’s Commitment to
Equity Will Determine Our Future (New York: Teachers College Press, 2010).
5. Ruth Chung Wei, Linda Darling-Hammond, and Frank Adamson, Professional Development
in the United States: Trends and Challenges (Dallas: National Staff Development Council, 2010).
6. Wei, Darling-Hammond, and Adamson, Professional Development in the United States.
7. Clive R. Belfield and Henry M. Levin, eds., The Price We Pay: Economic and Social
Consequences of Inadequate Education (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 2007); and
Richard Rothstein, Class and Schools: Using Social, Economic, and Educational Reform to Close
the Black-White Achievement Gap (New York: Teachers College Press, 2004).
8. Sen. Jack Reed (D-RI), “CORE Act Seeks to Bridge Student Achievement Gap, Expand
Access to Resources for Learning,” news release, June 27, 2014, www.reed.senate.gov/news/
releases/core-act-seeks-to-bridge-student-achievement-gap-expand-access-to-resourcesfor-learning.
9. Rep. Marcia Fudge (D-OH), “Congresswoman Fudge Introduces the Core Opportunity
Resources for Equity and Excellence (CORE) Act,” news release, June 26, 2014, www.fudge.
house.gov/press-statements/congresswoman-fudge-introduces-the-core-opportunity-resourcesfor-equity-and-excellence-core-act2.
10. Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, Building a High-Quality
Teaching Profession: Lessons from around the World (Paris: OECD, 2011), 13.
11. Elaine Allensworth, “Want to Improve Teaching? Create Collaborative, Supportive
Schools,” American Educator 36, no. 3 (Fall 2012): 30–31.
12. Linda Darling-Hammond, Audrey Amrein-Beardsley, Edward Haertel, and Jesse Rothstein,
“Evaluating Teacher Evaluation,” Phi Delta Kappan 93, no. 6 (March 2012): 8–15.
13. Linda Darling-Hammond, Getting Teacher Evaluation Right: What Really Matters
for Effectiveness and Improvement (New York: Teachers College Press, 2013). See also
Linda Darling-Hammond, “One Piece of the Whole: Teacher Evaluation as Part of a Comprehensive System for Teaching and Learning,” American Educator 38, no. 1 (Spring 2014): 4–13, 44.
THE PROFESSIONAL EDUCATOR
Pushing Back Against High Stakes
for Students with Disabilities
By Bianca Tanis
I
am a special education teacher in New
York and a mother of two children on the
autism spectrum. Sometimes it is difficult to separate these two roles. Being
intimately involved in the education system
has made navigating the world of special education for my children easier in some ways,
but also infinitely more difficult and heartbreaking in others. Simply put, I know too
much.
When my son began third grade in 2012, it
dawned on me that, as required by No Child
Left Behind (NCLB), he would soon be mandated to take state
tests in math and English language arts, aligned to the Common
Core State Standards, despite the fact that he reads at a first-grade
level and has numerous challenges with language. I was horrified
Bianca Tanis is a special education teacher in Rockland County, New York,
where she has taught for five years. She is a cofounder and member of the
New York State Allies for Public Education, a frequent blogger on education
topics, and a contributor to the forthcoming book Resisting Reform:
Reclaiming Public Education through Grassroots Activism, to be published by Information Age Publishing.
that my child would undergo such
inappropriate testing.
Unfortunately, since the passage of
NCLB in 2002, the practice of compelling all students, including students
like my son, to take one-size-fits-all,
high-stakes tests has become policy.
These tests were originally touted as a
way to shine a bright light on educational inequalities based on race,
class, and disability. While these tests
can have negative effects for many
students without special needs, they
actually prevent many disabled students in particular from receiving an individualized education
that meets their needs. Often, they are subjected to emotionally
harmful testing. Many special education teachers like myself have
questioned why the practice of administering one-size-fits-all
tests to special education students persists when it flies in the face
of logic and sound pedagogy. Fortunately, many are no longer
willing to remain silent about the flaws in this system.
Testing Too Much
I never set out to be an educator or an advocate for students with
disabilities. Teaching was a career change for me. After earning a
19
ILLUSTRATIONS BY NENAD JAKESEVIC
Professional educators—in the classroom, library, counseling center,
or anywhere in between—share one overarching goal: ensuring all
students receive the rich, well-rounded education they need to be
productive, engaged citizens. In this regular feature, we explore the
work of professional educators—their accomplishments and their
challenges—so that the lessons they have learned can benefit
students across the country. After all, listening to the professionals
who do this work every day is a blueprint for success.
bachelor’s degree in anthropology, I joined AmeriCorps and volunteered in a homeless shelter. Then, for several years, I worked
as a case manager in the same shelter. There, almost daily, I heard
the stories of adults who, for a variety of reasons, were unable to
find jobs and maintain stable living conditions and relationships.
I saw the impact that repeated failure has on one’s self-esteem and
the paralyzing effect it can have on one’s ability to chart a new
course in life.
After becoming a parent, and reflecting on my experiences in the shelter, I
realized that teachers would shape a
large part of my children’s lives, particularly their attitudes—not just about
school, but about themselves. I came to
understand teaching as a profession
that reaches beyond the scope of grades,
standards, and content instruction. I
wanted to join such a profession, and
eventually I pursued a dual master’s
degree in childhood education and
special education.
For the past five years, I have taught
students with disabilities from kindergarten to fifth grade in an affluent suburb of New York City. My students have
a range of strengths and challenges,
and although most are classified as
learning disabled, they are extremely
diverse in their learning needs.
As our school and state have
embraced the Common Core, it has
been challenging to bridge the gap
between what my students know and
can do and what the standards require.
The implementation of the Common
Core across all grades has resulted in
many students receiving instruction
without being taught the necessary
prerequisite skills. The situation is
especially problematic for students with learning challenges who
are sensitive to change and depend on sufficient scaffolding of
information and skills to learn. Students struggling prior to the
implementation of the Common Core suddenly find themselves
significantly further behind.
The problem has only been exacerbated by the advent of testbased teacher accountability required for states participating in the
Race to the Top initiative.1 My colleagues and I have found it
increasingly difficult to differentiate instruction for our students
while keeping up with the curriculum so they will be prepared to
take Common Core–aligned tests. Throw in the threat of a poor
evaluation and the loss of teacher job security, and you have a
recipe for disaster.
In an ideal world, if my fourth-graders need to spend an extra
week or two working on a math concept, I would use my professional judgment to assess their needs. But as things stand, I am
forced to move on, regardless of whether they are ready. There are
only so many weeks in the school year, and everything yet
untaught in the standards must be packed into the remaining
weeks because it will all appear on the test. Rather than a fluid
process in which students’ instructional needs come first, teaching has become a marathon to cram it all in. I honestly have heard
my colleagues telling their students on the fourth day of school,
“We have a lot to do today. We are already behind.” Midyear
assessments are given despite teachers not having had the chance
to teach all the content that will be tested, because administrators
“need the data” to assess whether students are on track for endof-the-year testing.
Accountability mandates and the
data that they demand have destroyed
teacher autonomy and created a culture
of constant testing. We say that teaching
is both an art and a science. Art requires
free thought, while science requires
experimentation. But the way things are
now, those who can’t keep up will be left
behind, because ultimately the tests are
in the driver’s seat. For that reason, the
testing frenzy we currently face has been
particularly detrimental to students
with disabilities.
Even if policymakers and education
leaders come to their senses, disregard
the pace of instruction set by the tests,
and cast aside all concern for rating
teachers based on students’ test scores,
they must still acknowledge and try to
ameliorate the negative emotional and
academic consequences of high-stakes
tests. In many cases, test scores alone
determine program placement or eligibility for grade advancement. Attaching
such high stakes to these tests is tantamount to a return to tracking, for students with and without special needs.
Test scores are also used to determine which students will be required
to attend academic intervention or
reteaching sessions, often by being pulled out of classes for which
students are not mandated to take standardized tests, such as
music, foreign language, or art. And many of my students excel in
music and art. Imagine what it must be like for a dyslexic 9-yearold who loves to play the saxophone to be told that he can’t take
music lessons or participate in the school band because he performed poorly on the state’s English language arts exam.
And then there is the experience of students taking the tests.
In the days before they do so, letters go home to parents advising
that children get adequate sleep and enjoy a good breakfast. Parents are asked to write notes of encouragement and send children
to school with special snacks or treats. To offset the fear and anxiety that many students associate with testing, teachers attempt to
create a party atmosphere in their classrooms, putting on music
and letting students play games prior to the tests. Some even
practice relaxation techniques with their students or encourage
positive visualization strategies in which they imagine themselves
in a favorite place or engaging in an activity they love.
Every year, I am struck by the lengths that we must go to in an
The testing frenzy
we currently face has
been particularly
detrimental to students
with disabilities.
20
effort to minimize the harm these tests do to our students. In the
end, we are fooling no one. Once the music stops, each child is on
his or her own, while the adults stand around trying to hide their
frustration and despair.
For teachers, testing days involve gathering those students who
need testing accommodations—as determined by a committee
on special education—and bringing them to a separate location
in the school building where they will ostensibly have fewer distractions. For the majority of my students,
the accommodation is extra time to take
the tests. Supposedly, this will level the
playing field for the student who is taking the fourth-grade English language
arts exam but reads independently at a
first- or second-grade level.
Once testing begins, it’s apparent that
the student who can’t sit still for 20 minutes can’t sit still for two hours or more.
Because some of these students also
have breaks as another testing accommodation, we stop the test periodically
for silent stretching. The stretching must
be silent, because if students talk, they
might accidentally discuss the test. By
the time we reach our first break, I have
usually had to make a few phone calls to
the school psychologist to counsel students who have shut down or begun
crying. (I used to also rely on the school
social worker for help, but that position
has been excessed due to budget cuts.)
Very often, the psychologist is busy with
other students experiencing similar
distress elsewhere in the building, and I
must send my students to sit in the main
office until another adult is available to
comfort them.
Perhaps the worst part of administering these tests is being forced to watch
the trust that I have worked so hard to
develop with my students break down.
Great teachers work tirelessly to build
relationships based on trust. They let
students know they can be counted on and will always be there to
help. What message does it send to students when their teacher,
who has recognized and celebrated their progress and perseverance all year long, places a test in front of them that they cannot
read or compute? How does it affect children when their requests
for help are met with “I can’t help you” and “just do your best”?
Breaking that trust for the sake of the test damages those relationships, sometimes beyond repair.
The time spent testing varies from state to state, but in New
York, a fifth-grade student with a disability may sit for as long as
three hours, for three days in a row, for just one test. I have sat with
a student for that length of time, reading each question aloud,
questions on subject matter beyond her ability, watching the
anguish grow on her face as she first missed snack time and then
later physical education.
Increasingly, as an educator, I have been forced to rely less on
my own professional judgment and more on rules and policies
dictated by bureaucrats who have never met students like mine
or even worked in a classroom. I find myself creating spreadsheets
and charts of student schedules in an effort to find a few minutes
here and there to fit in the extra time for the instruction my students need, instead of what the test mandates. I question whether
I am helping my students. And despite my passion for teaching, I
find myself questioning, after only five
years in the classroom, if teaching is
really right for me. At the moment,
what keeps me in the classroom is a
love of teaching. But I often wonder
how long it will take before teaching no
longer feels like teaching.
Knowing what I know, it is impossible for me to subject my son to these
tests. My son loves school, his teachers,
and the routine and security he finds
there. It wasn’t always this way. When
I left him at school for the very first
time, he was inconsolable. He shrieked
and sobbed. Unlike other students, it
took him years, not days or months, to
develop trust in an environment different from his home.
In light of my experiences administering tests that are years above children’s academic proficiency levels, the
idea that I should allow my son (who
did not yet understand the concept of
“test”) to experience such a potentially
upsetting situation was unthinkable.
However, my son did not qualify for an
alternate assessment, which, as per
NCLB, is permitted only for the most
severely disabled students.2 It was well
documented that his independent
decoding level for reading and his math
abilities were two years behind grade
level, and that his difficulty with language affected his reading comprehension significantly. Yet he was mandated
to take a test that every adult knew would result in frustration and,
ultimately, label him a failure.
In New York, the use of high-stakes testing to gauge the progress
and success of students, educators, and schools has created a toxic
environment in which teachers feel unable to meet students’ individual needs. It has also created anxiety-ridden students who are
viewed more as test scores than as learners. Across the state, only
about 5 percent of students with disabilities in grades 3–8 scored
proficient in English language arts in 2014.3 These scores indicate
that no matter their progress, 95 percent of our students with disabilities are considered failing. As a parent and educator, I reject
this narrative of failure for my son, and I also reject it for my
students.
Anyone who teaches knows that while pretesting is standard
practice as a diagnostic tool, posttests, or summative assessments,
The worst part of
administering highstakes tests is watching
the trust that I have
worked so hard to
develop with my
students break down.
21
are administered on material that students have been taught. The
notion that one would give a summative assessment to students
on material they have never been exposed to is absurd and would
be bad practice by any set of standards. And yet, children with
disabilities who receive individualized instruction must submit
to homogenous assessment at their grade level, no matter their
instructional level. Thus, the current system of high-stakes testing
is not a valid form of assessment for
students with disabilities.
Take, for example, a student I’ll call
Mark, a fourth-grader in my class who
reads at a first-grade level. Neither one
of Mark’s parents speaks English,
although Mark himself speaks English, French, and Spanish. Despite his
trilingual abilities, Mark has a very
poor grasp of basic concepts and
needs all academic content explained
in the simplest of terms. In the middle
of the New York state Grade 4 Common
Core English Language Arts Test, Mark
broke down crying, asking the proctor,
“Why don’t they give me something I
can do?” Because of his status as an
English language learner (ELL), state
law mandated that he be tested yet
again the following week using the ELL
version of the Common Core–aligned
English language arts test. In New York,
ELL students must take both tests
yearly until they are deemed proficient
on one of them. For many students
with disabilities who are also English
language learners, this type of double
testing goes on for years.4
As the parent of a child who requires
a modified curriculum, I expect that
his teachers will stretch him beyond
his current abilities. Sometimes, in the context of a safe and nurturing environment, that stretching may frustrate him. The frustration that comes with academic challenges tailored to the
individual strengths and weaknesses of a student greatly differs
from the frustration that the one-size-fits-all, high-stakes tests
create. Good teachers see the difference between the two, and
recognize that the former creates an important learning opportunity while the latter is far from constructive.
My son’s teachers, for example, understand that it is equally
important for him to practice engaging in a reciprocal conversation as it is for him to compute double-digit addition problems.
They understand that any frustration he feels when trying to
engage in that reciprocal conversation is very different from the
frustration he feels when confronted with a test he cannot access
or understand.
students with developmental delays and mild cognitive impairments, students with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, and
students with severe mental retardation. So while all students
should have access to a challenging curriculum, what constitutes
challenging must be fluid. I would argue that assessments for
students with disabilities must be as individualized as their Individualized Education Programs (IEPs), and that it is perhaps more
appropriate to measure progress than
benchmark attainment.
Although NCLB does allow some
testing accommodations, most states
do not allow any accommodations that
interfere with the construct of the test,
even if these accommodations are part
of a child’s IEP.5 For example, having
a passage read aloud on an English
language arts assessment may negate
the test as a measure of a child’s ability to decode, but it also may allow us
to obtain a more realistic measure of a
dyslexic student’s reading comprehension level, or the reading level of a visually impaired child who does not read
Braille. These types of accommodations allow for assessments that provide evidence of what a child can do,
rather than just providing further
confirmation of a disability.
Special education teachers frequently administer standardized academic tests as part of evaluations to
determine if a student is eligible for
special education services. These tests
include assessments such as the Woodcock-Johnson III Tests of Achievement
and the Wechsler Individual Achievement Test. These assessments, which
include questions sequenced from
easiest to hardest, identify a jumping-off point based on a student’s
age or grade. Students answer questions until a ceiling is identified:
the point at which the student incorrectly answers a number of
questions in a row. In this way, the time spent on testing is minimized and the negative impact of enduring difficult test questions
is mitigated. Perhaps these kinds of assessments can serve as a
model for high-quality assessments that allow educators to measure progress while maintaining the dignity and emotional wellbeing of students who already face significant challenges.
Were it the norm, this type of individualized assessment would
stop the flow of comparative data currently used to rank and sort
students and to judge teachers. But to create an education system
that truly caters to the learning and growth of each student (and
one that simultaneously encourages students’ strengths and supports their weaknesses), we must challenge the notion that learning can be represented by a test score. Only when the needs of
children, not the need to assess institutions or educators, become
the priority will we be able to consistently administer assessments
that yield useful information about our students.
Of course, it’s easier to point out the flaws in our education
For students with
disabilities, it is perhaps
more appropriate to
measure progress than
benchmark attainment.
A Better Path Forward
Who are “students with disabilities”? This category is a catchall
that encompasses a wide range of learners, including learningdisabled students with higher-than-average cognitive abilities,
22
system than to offer solutions. First and foremost, we must face
the uncomfortable truth that cognitive differences and differences in learning needs exist. But if that is difficult to admit, we
can take comfort in the fact that many students who face significant challenges more than likely demonstrate strengths that
surpass their weaknesses. Our job as educators is to do our best
to ensure our students will have satisfying career choices and
the strength of character, and the
knowledge, to work toward their goals,
overcome obstacles, handle disappointments, and become civic-minded
members of their communities. Despite
the fact that these skills and outcomes
cannot be measured by a test score,
they should be the goal of education.
To reach it, we must find alternatives to
high-stakes tests that hinder our ability
to meet some students’ instructional
needs.
The Importance of Educator
Advocacy and Teacher Voice
Increasingly, educators recognize we
can no longer make do with a broken
system that labels our students with disabilities as failures. Our role as educators requires that we do more than just
attempt to reduce the negative effects of
high-stakes testing. We must speak out
and teach our students that success in
life comes in many forms. When we
measure all children by the same yardstick, by the same version of success, we
risk limiting the possibilities that our
children see for themselves, and we narrow the lens with which we view them.
As teachers, that is not in our nature.
At some point in late 2013, something in me changed. My protective
instincts as a mother and my experience
as a special education teacher coalesced
in such a way that I lost my fear of any kind of reprisal for speaking
out against harmful testing practices. Ultimately, my husband and
I refused to allow our son to take the New York Common Core
assessments, despite the insistence of state officials that his participation was legally required. Along with several other parents
committed to ending the use of high-stakes testing (many of
whom are also educators), I cofounded a parent advocacy group
called New York State Allies for Public Education. We represent a
coalition of more than 50 parent and educator groups in New York,
and our combined voices have raised awareness throughout the
state. In the spring of 2014, between 55,000 and 60,000 students
in New York refused to participate in high-stakes testing.6 And in
light of pressure from educators and parents, New York state
applied for a waiver from the federal government that would allow
students with significant disabilities to be tested up to two years
below grade level. Although such a waiver would merely act as a
Band-Aid, it is a start.
As educators, we should raise our voices and be heard by
policymakers who have little to no teaching experience and would
relegate classroom teachers to mere foot soldiers marching to the
beat of misguided reforms. We must change the culture that exists
in schools by encouraging each other to voice our concerns,
because in the end, only educators can breathe life into the theoretical discussions that take place regarding testing students with
disabilities. Only educators can speak
up for students and ensure that their
well-being is considered.
In New York, educators are bound
by a gag order that prohibits us from
speaking about end-of-the-year statemandated tests in even the vaguest of
terms.7 Concerned about the quality
and content of these tests, Brooklyn
teachers took to the street in protest,
many with duct tape on their mouths.8
That teachers have been prevented
from speaking out is unacceptable.
Success never will look the same
for all. NCLB’s goal of 100 percent
proficiency as judged by high-stakes
testing is antithetical to learning.
When we deny diversity in student
strengths, weaknesses, and abilities,
we risk robbing children of the chance
to experience success that begets confidence and perseverance. We risk
sending the message that to be different is to be less than. We all know the
child who scores off the charts on a
standardized test but can’t pack his
bag at the end of the day or tie her
shoes. We also know the child who
struggles to read and retain math concepts but is a prodigy on the saxophone. High-stakes testing does not
reveal the full picture of who children
are. As educators, we must demand
better for our students.
☐
As educators, we must
encourage each other
to voice our concerns.
Only we can breathe
life into theoretical
discussions regarding
testing.
Endnotes
1. National Center for Education Evaluation and Regional Assistance, State Requirements for
Teacher Evaluation Policies Promoted by Race to the Top (Washington, DC: Institute of
Education Sciences, 2014).
2. U.S. Department of Education, State and Local Implementation of the No Child Left
Behind Act, vol. 5, Implementation of the 1 Percent Rule and 2 Percent Interim Policy Options
(Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Education, 2009).
3. Engage NY, Measuring Student Progress in Grades 3–8 English Language Arts and
Mathematics (Albany: New York State Education Department, 2014), 37.
4. New York State Education Department, New York State Testing Program: NYSESLAT 2014
School Administrator’s Manual (Albany: New York State Education Department, 2014).
5. U.S. Department of Education, State and Local Implementation.
6. Gail Robinson, “Scores on State Tests Inch Up Slightly; 29% Pass ELA Exam,” Insideschools,
August 14, 2014, www.insideschools.org/blog/item/1000863-scores-on-state-tests-inch-upslightly-29-pass-ela-exam.
7. Valerie Strauss, “AFT Asks Pearson to Stop ‘Gag Order’ Barring Educators from Talking
about Tests,” Answer Sheet (blog), Washington Post, April 25, 2014, www.washingtonpost.
com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2014/04/25/aft-asks-pearson-to-stop-gag-order-barring-educatorsfrom-talking-about-tests.
8. Adam Janos, “State Tests Prompt Protests in Brooklyn,” Metropolis (blog), Wall Street
Journal, April 4, 2014, http://blogs.wsj.com/metropolis/2014/04/04/state-tests-prompt-protestsin-brooklyn.
23
Help-Seekers and Silent Strugglers
Student Problem-Solving in Elementary Classrooms
By Jessica Calarco
ILLUSTRATIONS BY JAMES YANG
O
ne February morning, the students in Ms. Dunham’s
fifth-grade class were taking a math test. Jesse, a student from a suburban working-class family, was bent
over his desk, tapping his pencil, a deep frown on his
face. Ms. Dunham weaved her way around the room, glancing
over students’ shoulders as they worked. Sensing Jesse’s frustration, she paused next to his desk. Leaning down, she whispered:
“You OK?” Jesse looked up sheepishly. Pointing at question 5, he
hesitated and admitted quietly: “I don’t get this one.” Ms. Dunham
nodded and gave Jesse a quick explanation.
After Ms. Dunham finished explaining, Jesse continued to
frown, but she did not notice. As soon as Ms. Dunham finished
answering Jesse’s question, Ellen, a student from a middle-class
family, thrust her hand high in the air and whispered loudly:
“Ms. Dunham!”
Jessica Calarco is an assistant professor of sociology at Indiana University
and a former intern with the AFT’s educational issues department. Her
research focuses on social inequalities with respect to children, culture,
education, and families. This article is based on research published in the
American Sociological Review (2011 and 2014) and in Social Psychology
Quarterly (2014).
24
Ms. Dunham immediately turned toward Ellen. Ellen let her
shoulders fall in a dramatic slump. “What does number 5 mean?”
Ms. Dunham gave Ellen the same brief answer she gave Jesse,
but Ellen was not satisfied; she immediately followed up with
another question: “Wait, but does that mean we’re supposed to
multiply?”
Ms. Dunham went over to Ellen and squatted beside her, talking her through the problem with a longer, more detailed explanation. From across the room, Jesse watched Ms. Dunham for a
moment and then sighed softly, sinking lower in his chair and
continuing to frown at his test.
When I talked to Jesse about this incident later, he explained with
frustration that although Ms. Dunham tried to help him, he “didn’t
even understand what she said,” and he blamed himself for not
understanding: “Ellen is smart, and when Ms. Dunham finished
with me, she went over there, and Ellen got the question right.”
As Jesse and Ellen illustrate, students’ experiences and outcomes—even in the same classroom—often diverge along socioeconomic lines.* As I will explain, students from different
backgrounds tend to manage problems in contrasting ways. Those
*I determined students’ class backgrounds using data from parent surveys. Teachers
generally had only a vague sense of students’ family circumstances, including knowing
which students received free lunches.
differences, in turn, have real consequences in the classroom.
They show the pervasive and often nonmonetary ways that social
class matters in our schools.
Social Class Differences
in Learning and Parenting
In attempting to explain the role of social class in the classroom,
scholars typically point to schools and families. Teachers want the
best for their students, but they also face real challenges in their
efforts to ensure that all students have equal opportunity to succeed. We know, for example, that students from working-class
families often attend schools with limited resources.1 Even in the
same schools, children from middle-class families tend to be
assigned to higher academic tracks or ability groups.2 There is also
some evidence that teachers, whether they realize it or not, may
hold less-privileged students to different standards than their
middle-class peers.3
We also know that families from different social classes are not
equally equipped to support their children’s learning, and that
those differences generate advantages for students from middleclass families and disadvantages for students from working-class
families at school. In her book Home Advantage: Social Class and
Parental Intervention in Elementary Education, Annette Lareau
shows that while middle-class and working-class parents both
and activities that research shows are conducive to learning. 6
Compared with their peers from working-class families, children
from middle-class families have better access to educational
resources,7 participate in more extracurricular and enrichment
activities,8 and are encouraged to express themselves more frequently and fully at home.9 As a result, they tend to start school
ahead of their peers from working-class families,10 and they also
maintain those academic advantages over time.11
Through my research, I have found that these existing explanations for class-based inequalities in children’s outcomes are important but limited. Specifically, they are limited by their lack of
attention to the children themselves and how teachers respond to
them. As my classroom observations show, children are not simply
the passive recipients of advantages (or disadvantages) provided
to them by their parents and their schools. Rather, the class-based
behaviors that children bring with them to the classroom play a
powerful role in generating educational inequalities.
As I will show, these unequal outcomes were particularly
apparent with respect to children’s efforts to manage challenges
they encountered in the classroom. In such situations, children
used different problem-solving strategies, depending on their
families’ socioeconomic level. More specifically, children from
middle-class families tended to actively seek help from their
teachers, while children from working-class families generally
Students’ experiences and
outcomes—even in the same
classroom—often diverge
along socioeconomic lines.
care deeply about their children’s academic success, middle-class
parents are more familiar with school expectations and are more
comfortable intervening at school on their children’s behalf.4 This
kind of parental involvement in schooling has positive effects on
children’s learning and achievement, and thus contributes to
inequalities in children’s outcomes.5 †
In Lareau’s book Unequal Childhoods: Class, Race, and Family
Life, she further shows that middle-class parents are better able
to provide their children with the kinds of home environments
†
Maplewood has very few students who live below the poverty line. Thus, I focused
primarily on the differences between students from working-class and middle-class
families. If the study had included more students from poor families, I suspect that the
social class differences I observed in students’ problem-solving would have been
similar or even more pronounced.
tried to manage problems on their own. I found that they did so
because of contrasting lessons they learned at home, with parents
coaching them to adopt class-based understandings of the
“appropriate” way to problem solve. These different approaches,
however, did not automatically generate inequalities. Rather,
inequalities resulted because teachers—through no fault of their
own—tended to respond to children’s class-based problemsolving strategies in different ways.
A Fly on the Wall at Maplewood Elementary
Before reviewing these findings in detail and discussing their
implications, let me first set the stage. I base my conclusions on
more than three years of observations and interviews with students, teachers, and parents in one suburban, public elementary
25
school. That school—which I call Maplewood—is located outside
a large city on the East Coast. It enrolls approximately 500 students
in grades K through 5, with four classrooms (and four teachers)
in each grade. (The names of all students and teachers have been
changed to protect their anonymity.) The low brick building is
nestled in a quiet residential neighborhood, surrounded by trees
and playing fields. The wide hallways constantly bustle with activity and are adorned with inspirational posters and colorful displays of student work.
Maplewood serves students from diverse socioeconomic
backgrounds but is also relatively homogeneous with respect to
race and ethnicity. The majority of the students (80 percent) are
white; the rest are mostly Latino or Asian American, with only a
handful of African American students. In my research, I focused
on the white students, as they included students from both
middle-class (70 percent) and working-class (30 percent) fami-
who were enrolled in third grade during the 2008–2009 school
year. I followed that cohort of students over time, observing them
in the fourth and fifth grades as well. During that time, I visited
Maplewood at least twice weekly, for about three hours per visit.
I divided my observation times between the four classrooms in
each grade, and I observed each class during a variety of subjects
and activities. In the classroom, I was primarily an observer with
a notebook—sitting in empty seats or circling around as the students worked—though I sometimes helped with organizational
tasks or had informal conversations with students and teachers.
In addition, I conducted formal interviews with all of the third-,
fourth-, and fifth-grade teachers at Maplewood, and with a group
of students and parents in the cohort. I used these interviews to
learn more about teachers’ goals and expectations, about individual students and their home lives, and about students’ interactions with parents and peers outside of school. And I supplemented
The class-based behaviors that
children bring with them to the
classroom play a powerful role
in generating educational
inequalities.
lies. This allowed me to compare how students from different
socioeconomic backgrounds—but of the same race and ethnicity—interacted in the same classrooms and with the same teachers and peers.
I use very specific definitions of social class, which may differ
in some ways from other common conceptions of class in American society. As I define them, the “middle-class” families at
Maplewood were those in which at least one parent had both a
four-year college degree and a professional or white-collar job
(e.g., teacher, lawyer, engineer, office manager). While some of
these families had experienced divorce or financial problems
(e.g., a parent lost a job), they all led relatively comfortable lives.
The “working-class” families, on the other hand, were less privileged overall. Parents in working-class families, per my definition,
had lower levels of education and less occupational prestige: most
had a high school diploma and worked in blue-collar or service
jobs (e.g., food service worker, transportation worker, daycare
provider, sales clerk). These working-class families, however, also
differed from families living in poverty in that they typically had
steady jobs, modest incomes, and stable relationships, with
divorce rates similar to those of middle-class families.
At Maplewood, I focused on one cohort of students—those
26
this interview data with information from parent surveys, which
included questions about students’ family backgrounds, friendships, and activities, and students’ academic records.
Qualitative studies like mine cannot say whether patterns
observed in one school can also be observed in others. But that is
not their goal. Instead, the goal is to understand the social processes and interactions that produce those patterns. In this study,
for example, I show how differences in the support-seeking strategies of students from different social class backgrounds contributed to inequalities at school.
Contrasting Lessons about Problem Solving
During my time with students, parents, and teachers, I found
that children from middle-class families and those from workingclass families came to school equipped with different beliefs
about and different strategies for managing problems at school.
These contrasting approaches to problem solving reflected the
class-based lessons children learned from their parents at home.
In other words, the children were often doing what their parents
told them to do. When teaching their children how to manage
challenges at school, middle-class parents encouraged a “by-anymeans” approach to problem solving that involved negotiating
with teachers for assistance and accommodations. In contrast,
working-class parents stressed a “no-excuses” approach to problem solving that involved respecting teachers’ authority by not
seeking assistance.
These contrasting messages were apparent in the lessons that
both middle-class and working-class parents described teaching
their children at home. In interviews, for example, I asked parents
what they thought their children should do if they were confused
or struggling at school. Without hesitation, one middle-class
mother said:
I always tell them they should go up to the teacher and ask.
Whether it’s [to] raise their hand or quietly walk up to the
teacher and ask. But they should ask. They should get clarification, as opposed to making a bad decision or getting it
wrong. No matter what the question is, as long as they ask
respectfully. I think you should always be able to ask questions in any life situation. So I always tell my kids: “The
answer’s always no until you ask. So you gotta ask. If they say
no, then you haven’t lost anything. But that doesn’t usually
happen. Usually they help you—you find out something.
Even if it’s not much more, you’re better off for having asked.”
Like this mother, middle-class parents taught their children to feel
entitled to assistance and to recognize that asking was always better than “making a bad decision or getting it wrong.”
Working-class parents, on the other hand, worried that teachers might perceive requests for help or clarification as disrespectful. As a result, they offered their children very different lessons
about managing problems at school. In interviews, I asked
working-class parents the same questions about what they
thought their children should do if they were confused or struggling. After thinking about this question for a moment, Mr. Graham, a working-class father, carefully explained:
My kids know that you just do your best and try. I just want my
kids to be respectful, responsible. I try to be on the proactive,
teaching them about being responsible and just getting it done.
I tell ’em to just get it done and not complain. I always tell ’em:
“Look, if you’ve gotta give somebody a hard time, give it to me.
Don’t give it to your teachers.” And I’ve never had a teacher
complain. My kids are good for the teachers.
Mr. Graham went on to recall that when his high-achieving
daughter, Amelia, was in third grade, she came home from school
confused about a comment on her report card, telling her father
that the comment “didn’t seem to make sense.” Recalling his
response, Mr. Graham explained: “I told her not to ask about it,
cuz the teacher probably wouldn’t be too happy.” Like other
working-class parents, Mr. Graham seemed to equate questions
with complaints or excuses. He wanted to protect his children
from reprimand, and thus taught them that teachers would be
upset by requests for clarification. In light of these beliefs, working-class parents encouraged their children to work hard and to
manage problems on their own.
Contrasting Problem-Solving Strategies
Parents’ lessons prompted students from middle-class and working-class families to view classroom challenges in contrasting
ways. Students from middle-class families felt entitled to assis-
tance from teachers and were very comfortable making requests.
In interviews, for example, they often said things like: “It was easy
to talk to the teacher if I had questions,” or “I don’t want to guess
and risk getting it wrong, because then I won’t get as high a grade
as I should have gotten. So it’s better to go up and ask the teacher.”
While shy and high-achieving children from middle-class families
were sometimes nervous about speaking up or being perceived as
“stupid,” their parents’ persistent coaching helped to reassure
these children that teachers would welcome their requests and
that the benefits would outweigh the risks.
Students from working-class families, on the other hand, held a
very different view. Like their parents, they worried that teachers
would perceive requests for assistance as a sign of laziness or disrespect. In interviews, for example, students from working-class
families would often say things like: “You need to work hard and
learn things. Like, teachers give you work to learn things. And if you
get help, you’re not learning,” or “Teachers want you to be able to
Children from middle-class
families and those from workingclass families came to school
with different beliefs about and
strategies for managing problems
at school.
figure it out for yourself, because you’re not always gonna be able
to ask,” or “If you have a question, like about homework, you should
just skip it. You don’t wanna go up and bug the teacher.”
While students from middle-class families felt entitled to assistance and focused on the possible benefits of help-seeking, students from working-class families were deeply concerned about
the potential drawbacks associated with such requests. As a result,
they typically tried to deal with problems on their own rather than
reaching out to their teachers.
An example from Ms. Nelson’s fourth-grade math class makes
these contrasting patterns apparent. At the beginning of each math
period, Ms. Nelson asks her students to find their randomly
assigned “math buddies” and pick a spot in the room to work. She
then has each pair work together to complete a worksheet reinforcing the concepts from the previous day’s lessons.
One morning, during a unit on multiplication, Ms. Nelson
handed out a worksheet that instructed students to “fill in the
blanks” in various sets of multiplication facts (e.g., ____, 22, ____,
44, ____, ____, 77) and then “find the patterns” for each row. While
the first task was relatively straightforward, many of the pairs found
themselves confused by the second half of the directions. Brian and
Kelly, both students from middle-class families, completed the facts
27
Studying the Ways Students Get Help with Classwork
BY SARAH D. SPARKS
If you need help, raise your hand.
It’s one of the first lessons of school, but
as students learn in an increasing variety of
settings—in and out of classrooms, in person
and online—educators and researchers are
starting to take another look at how
students learn to ask for help.
In a typical classroom, there are those
students who raise their hands constantly
and others who try to overhear the teacher’s
response to other students’ questions
without ever asking their own. And in
online classes, some students hit the “help”
button over and over to get straight to the
answer, while others seek advice on
problem-solving strategies. These behaviors
can tell educators and researchers a lot
about what a student thinks about learning,
his or her engagement in the subject, and
the student’s confidence in the support of
teachers and peers.
That makes help-seeking behaviors
uniquely useful as educators and policymakers look for ways to improve not just
students’ test scores but the deeper
“academic mindsets” that form a foundation for student learning—among them,
perseverance, intellectual curiosity, and a
“growth mindset,” the belief that ability
and knowledge in a particular subject is
gained through experience rather than
being innate.
“Help-seeking is actually part of the
process of self-regulation,” says Sarah M.
Sarah D. Sparks is a contributing writer for Education
Week. This article first appeared in the August 19, 2014,
issue of Education Week. Reprinted with permission
from Editorial Projects in Education.
28
Kiefer, an associate professor of educational
psychology at the University of South
Florida. While it’s difficult to nail down what
“perseverance” looks like in a classroom, she
says studying help-seeking can provide not
only clear measures of students’ mindsets
but also an opening to strengthen students’
learning skills.
“It’s something that’s very visible in the
classroom, which makes it great for
teachers,” Kiefer says.
To get help successfully, a student has to
understand that he or she has a problem,
decide whether and whom to ask for help,
do so clearly, and process the help that’s
given, says Stuart A. Karabenick, a research
professor studying help behaviors at the
University of Michigan School of Education.
Some students ask for help before they even
start thinking about a problem, while others
avoid seeking help even after struggling
fruitlessly on their own.
Whether a student is managing academic
help appropriately can depend on the
subject, the classroom context, and the
student’s personality. “The term ‘helpseeking’ suggests a deficit, but we need
students to think of this as managing
resources to solve a problem,” Karabenick
says. “You are always in the process of
learning, and therefore you never know as
much as you should. One has to learn the
skills to acquire the knowledge you need.”
Afraid to Ask
That doesn’t mean students—or even many
teachers—are comfortable asking for help.
“Help-seeking is both academic and
social in nature, and adolescents are looking
at their classroom as an academic and social
minefield,” Kiefer says. As students move
from elementary to middle and high school,
the costs of looking foolish in front of their
teacher and classmates start to weigh
heavily in their decisions about how and
when to get help.1
In one 2012 study, educational psychologist Allison M. Ryan of the University of
Michigan found that as children got older,
they became less likely to ask classmates for
help in understanding concepts, but far
more likely to get “expedient” help—like
copying homework.2
Similarly, in a forthcoming study of
sixth-grade girls, Kiefer and her colleagues
found that students were often reluctant to
ask for help from others who were more
popular than they were or who were
perceived to be at the top of the class in that
subject. It was just “too risky” socially.
Expedient help “is not cheating exactly,”
Kiefer says, “but [students] are like, ‘I just
want to get the homework done.’ It’s less
threatening to their self-efficacy and
self-worth” than to admit they don’t
understand the lesson.
Differences in help-seeking can
exacerbate achievement gaps between
students. Kiefer’s research has found that
students from low-income and workingclass families are often taught that they
should not “bother” the teacher by asking
for help, while middle-class students are
often taught to be “squeaky wheels” and
ask for help aggressively.3 While teachers
often appreciated the working-class
students’ politeness and patience, they
were also more likely to overlook them in
favor of giving help to the more assertive
students from better-off backgrounds.
Ryan and Kiefer have been exploring
how teachers can use peer study groups and
tutoring to boost students’ confidence in
asking peers for help. “We have to figure
out what are students really striving for in
the classroom, not just academically but also
socially?” Kiefer says. “If you can take away
the mindset that ‘I don’t want to look like a
loser,’ and promote a growth mindset, that’s
huge.”
When Helping Hurts
If students who actively ask for help get
more support in the long term, does that
mean students will learn more if they all
become squeaky wheels? Not necessarily:
too much help can hurt as much as too
little. “Too often, we don’t give students
the opportunity to make sense by themselves,” says Ido Roll, a researcher on
students’ help-seeking behavior and the
senior manager for research and evaluation at the Center for Teaching, Learning,
and Technology at the University of British
Columbia. “We do know that students kind
of like to ask for too much help; over and
over again [in online systems], students will
ask … for all the help they can.”
While online courses can make it easier
for more-reserved students to ask for help,
Roll says they increase the risk that
students will focus on expedient help
rather than help that improves learning,
such as problem-solving strategies. It’s
easier to simply ask for “the answer”
online than in a live class discussion, he
says.
In one study published this fall in the
Journal of the Learning Sciences, Roll and
his colleagues tracked when high school
students with high and low math skills
asked for help on a computer-based
geometry tutoring program.4 As might be
expected, the students who overused the
would benefit more from either a longer,
straighter path to the restaurant or the
opportunity to stroll around and explore a
restaurant district.
“Too often, we are adding cognitive
load when we give help,” Roll says,
because the information provided by a
teacher or computer program often still
requires a basic level of understanding of
the subject, which a student may not have.
“I’m all for giving help, but giving help
is not telling you what to do,” Roll says.
“It’s giving resources to help you make
sense of it yourself.”
Setting the Tone
That can be challenging, even for experienced teachers. “Teachers may not know
why students don’t ask for help,” Karabenick says. “It may be that ‘I don’t know what
I don’t know,’ ‘I don’t know how to ask,’
‘I’m afraid to ask,’ or ‘I just don’t need
help.’ ” “One of the major skills a teacher
frustrated students lean forward but
remain upright in their body posture.5
The researchers are hoping to make it
easier for software programs and teachers
alike to recognize subtle differences in
students’ postures that might signal when
they need help but are uncomfortable
asking for it.
From the first day of school, teachers
can set the tone in their classrooms to
improve help-seeking. For example,
Karabenick found that in classes where
teachers give short answers to complex
questions, students become less likely to
ask for help over time.
Teachers in lower grades typically start
the year showing students the etiquette
for asking questions—building on that old
sequence of raising your hand, waiting to
be called on, and so on. Karabenick advises
also talking with students about when and
whom they can ask for help, and letting
them role-play different scenarios.
From the first day of school,
teachers can set the tone in
their classrooms to improve
help-seeking.
help feature of the program—who simply
clicked through to the answer, for example—learned less in the end, and students
who asked for help primarily on the most
challenging questions learned more in
general. Interestingly, students with little
prior knowledge of a particular question
learned more when they avoided help and
instead tried and failed repeatedly.
Roll and his colleagues also suggest that
low-skilled students may not have enough
prior knowledge to understand high-level
help. Think of giving dining suggestions to
two people—a native of your city and a
visitor. The native resident, like the student
with high math skills in the study, understands the layout and traffic of the city
enough to benefit from somewhat
convoluted, backroads directions to the
hot new hole in the wall. The visitor, like
the low-skill student, might be more
confused by your insider knowledge and
needs,” he says, “is to be able to distinguish among these, … but teachers by and
large are not given any training in
help-seeking, and they may not be
comfortable asking for help themselves.”
Sidney D’Mello, an assistant professor of
computer science and psychology at the
University of Notre Dame, is using facialtracking cameras and seat sensors to
analyze the differences in facial and body
posture associated with different emotions
of learners in the classroom.
For example, students who are intensively engaged in their work and who likely
do not need help—those said to be “in the
flow”—lean forward in their seats and look
intent, in a way that can seem similar to
the posture of a student who is confused
and frustrated. But D’Mello and his
colleagues found that students actually in
the flow lean forward more steeply,
leaving the backs of their chairs a bit, while
“Make it explicit, let them practice it. …
It can be very, very effective to make it
transparent that this is a normal part of
learning,” he says.
☐
Endnotes
1. Sungok Serena Shim, Sarah M. Kiefer, and Cen Wang, “Help
Seeking Among Peers: The Role of Goal Structure and Peer
Climate,” Journal of Educational Research 106 (2013):
290–300.
2. Allison M. Ryan and Sungok Serena Shim, “Changes in Help
Seeking from Peers during Early Adolescence: Associations with
Changes in Achievement and Perceptions of Teachers,” Journal
of Educational Psychology 104 (2012): 1122–1134.
3. Sarah D. Sparks, “Advocacy Tactics Found to Differ By Families’
Class,” Education Week, August 29, 2012. This article briefly
discusses Jessica Calarco’s ongoing work as it stood in 2012.
4. Ido Roll, Ryan S. J. d. Baker, Vincent Aleven, and Kenneth R.
Koedinger, “On the Benefits of Seeking (and Avoiding) Help in
Online Problem-Solving Environments,” Journal of the Learning
Sciences 23 (2014): 537–560.
5. Sidney D’Mello and Art Graesser, “Mining Bodily Patterns of
Affective Experience during Learning,” in Proceedings of the
Third International Conference on Educational Data Mining, ed.
Ryan S. J. d. Baker, Agathe Merceron, and Philip I. Pavlik Jr.
(Pittsburgh: International Working Group on Educational Data
Mining, 2010), 31–40.
29
quickly, but then began to debate what it meant to “find the patterns.” Almost immediately, Brian suggested: “Let’s ask Ms. Nelson.”
Kelly nodded and they both jumped up from their seats.
Stopping in front of Ms. Nelson, Brian thrust out the worksheet
and declared breathlessly: “We got all the facts, but we don’t know
what kinds of patterns we’re supposed to find.”
As Ms. Nelson was answering this question, a number of other
students from middle-class families also got up to ask for help
with the directions. One of these students, Danny, was working
teachers often assumed, as Ms. Nelson did, that they were off task,
and thus reprimanded them for not being more focused. Ironically,
however, students from working-class families tended to avoid
seeking help out of a desire to avoid frustrating the teachers with
their requests. As Sadie explained in an interview, “If you have a
question, like about homework, you should just skip it. You don’t
wanna go up and bug the teacher.”
While the teachers at Maplewood were generally very willing
to answer questions (and I never saw a teacher reprimand a stu-
Students from working-class
families worried that teachers
would perceive requests for
assistance as a sign of laziness
or disrespect.
with Tory, a student from a working-class family. While Tory
waited at her seat, Danny got up to ask for help. Ms. Nelson
answered the students’ questions patiently, reminding them of
the activity the day before.*
Meanwhile, two students from working-class families, Sadie and
Carter, were also struggling with the worksheet but did not ask for
help. Sitting nearby, I could hear them whispering as they bent over
their worksheets, frowning. Rather than complete all of the facts
and then look for patterns, Sadie and Carter had filled in only the
first row and were arguing in hushed voices about what kinds of
patterns they were supposed to find.
Although Ms. Nelson was circling the room, Sadie and Carter
never asked for help. Fifteen minutes after the start of the math
period, they were the only students still working. After glancing at
the clock, Ms. Nelson turned to them and said: “You guys! Time’s
up. You were the only group that didn’t finish. You guys need to
work better together.” Sadie and Carter looked down at the floor,
squirming nervously, but said nothing. In that moment, they could
have explained to Ms. Nelson that they were struggling to understand the directions for the worksheet, but they did not.
This reluctance to seek help was typical among students from
working-class families, and it had real consequences. Like Sadie
and Carter, students from working-class families often took longer
to finish their assignments or completed them incorrectly. Furthermore, because these students did not acknowledge their struggles,
*When students from middle-class and working-class families worked together,
students from middle-class families would often take the lead in asking teachers for
help.
30
dent for seeking help), students from working-class families worried that teachers might respond negatively if they asked for help
at the wrong time or in the wrong way. This put teachers in a bind.
It was hard for them to help students if they didn’t know they were
having trouble.
That said, and as we saw with Jesse, the student I mentioned
earlier, children from working-class families did sometimes
acknowledge their struggles. In these instances, however, they
tended to be less assertive than their middle-class peers. Like
Ellen, students from middle-class families would often call out
to or approach the teacher directly, even interrupting to ask
questions. Furthermore, if teachers tried to defer answering such
questions, or if they offered only minimal information, students
from middle-class families tended to continue asking for more
complete or more immediate assistance.
Students from working-class families, like Jesse, on the other
hand, would generally wait for teachers to approach them and
offer assistance. Furthermore, when these students did try to seek
help, they tended to raise their hands rather than call out to teachers or approach them with questions. As Sadie explained in her
interview, “If the teacher says, ‘Did anybody have any problems
with the homework?’ then you can raise your hand.” Also, like
Jesse, these students rarely asked follow-up questions, even when
they were still confused.
How Teachers Can Help
By adopting a more assertive approach to help-seeking, children
from middle-class families tended to receive more attention and
assistance from teachers and, as a result, tended to complete their
work more quickly and more accurately than did their peers from
working-class families. Thus, class differences in children’s
problem-solving strategies often resulted in unequal educational
outcomes.
A key question, then, is why? While some might assume that
middle-class approaches to problem solving were inherently better, I found that it was not the children’s strategies themselves that
led to these unequal outcomes but rather the teachers’ responses
to those strategies. I don’t at all mean to imply that teachers at
Maplewood were overtly biased against children from workingclass families. In many ways, it was clear they cared deeply about
all their students and worried about those who, as one teacher
noted, were not getting enough “support at home.” But despite
their good intentions, the structure of the school day and the pressures they faced made it hard for teachers to provide equal support to all their students.
The teachers at Maplewood often felt overwhelmed by
accountability mandates, mountains of paperwork, large class
sizes, curriculum changes, and constant meeting requests. As one
teacher explained, “It’s not that we don’t care. It’s just that we’ve
got our heads down trying to get things done.” Faced with numerous demands on their time and attention, teachers often found it
hard to assess and respond to each student’s individual needs.
There simply was not enough time in the day to repeatedly check
on each student and provide him or her with personalized support
and assistance.
My classroom observations suggest that teachers can inadvertently contribute to classroom inequalities, at least in part,
by misreading the thinking behind students’ problem-solving
strategies. That said, this is not the fault of teachers. As one
Maplewood teacher pointed out to his students, “I can’t read
minds. You have to let me know [if you are struggling].” Still, if
educators are aware of their students’ class-based patterns and
possible misperceptions, they may be better equipped to help
all their students succeed.
To avoid having social class unduly influence students’ problem-solving strategies, teachers can set clear expectations for
when and how students should seek help. In some situations, the
teachers at Maplewood explicitly encouraged their students to
ask for help and actively demonstrated their willingness to answer
questions. They did this both through their words (e.g., “Let me
know if you have any questions,” and “Come and see me up here
if you need help”) and through their actions (e.g., circling the
room, checking students’ progress, and watching for signs of
struggle). In these instances, students from middle-class families
readily sought assistance, and students from working-class families were more willing to do so.
During a fifth-grade art class, for example, the students worked
on collages while the teacher, Ms. Cantore, circled the room. Meanwhile, Haley, a student from a working-class family, was struggling
to find her collage, digging frantically through the project bin at the
back of the room. She did not initially call out or ask for help, but as
Ms. Cantore circled past, she noticed the worried frown on Haley’s
face and asked gently: “You OK?” Keeping her eyes down, Haley
said quietly: “I can’t find my collage. It’s not here.”
Ms. Cantore gave Haley a reassuring smile and explained: “I put
the ones without names on the table up front. Lindsay [a student
from a middle-class family] just found hers up there. Let’s see if we
can find yours, too.” Haley nodded gratefully and followed Ms.
Cantore to the front table, where they searched together through
the collages without names and eventually located Haley’s in the
stack. As Ms. Cantore illustrates in this example, when teachers’
willingness to assist was more explicit, students from working-class
families were more comfortable seeking help, as they could rest
assured they would not be reprimanded for their requests.
Certainly, the teachers I observed did not mean to confuse or
frustrate students. Rather, ambiguities in teachers’ expectations
resulted, in large part, from the dynamic and interactive nature of
today’s elementary school classrooms. Teachers used their professional judgment to adjust their standards around help-seeking,
doing so for different activities (e.g., tests versus in-class projects),
for the time constraints they were facing (e.g., “We have to move on
or we won’t have time to finish”), and even in response to the appropriateness of particular requests (e.g., “We’ll talk about that later”).
And yet, when teachers did not make expectations around seeking
help extremely explicit, students were left to determine whether
and how to make requests. Such decisions, in turn, tended to exacerbate social class differences in student help-seeking.
By no means do teachers intend to respond to students in different ways. Such actions are more often than not inadvertent and
unintentional. Outside pressures like testing and paperwork, for
example, take teachers’ time and attention away from their students. These factors are often outside of the control of teachers.
Yet, they can still take steps to control how they respond to
students’ requests for help. Teachers can be cognizant of the
need to make clear their expectations for fielding questions in
the classroom. They can take time—when possible—to check on
students as they work and offer assistance to those who appear
to be struggling. They can also reassure their students that questions will not result in reprimand, that directions cannot cover
all situations, and that confusion is normal. Even beyond these
concrete steps, simply being aware of the differences that students bring with them to school can help level the playing field.
It is important that teachers realize the power they have to prevent students’ social class backgrounds from determining who
receives support in managing challenges at school.
☐
(Endnotes on page 44)
31
Beyond the Stacks
How Librarians Support Students and Schools
By Joanna Freeman
ILLUSTRATIONS BY KARINE DAISAY
F
or years, whenever I met someone who asked me what
I did for a living, I simply said, “I’m a librarian in an
elementary school.” I had always thought of myself as a
librarian first, and I also knew this was an answer people
would immediately understand. Almost everyone has an idea of
what the job entails, even if that impression is decades old. Cue
image of a woman wearing glasses and sporting a bun, sitting
behind a reference desk, shushing students, or walking between
the stacks to help them find just the right book.
A few years ago, I realized that for me, answering “librarian”
was the easy way out. School librarian positions were being cut
right and left in districts across the country, including in my own
state of Washington, touted as an easy way to save money and jobs
that would not directly affect class size or student achievement.
Between 2006 and 2011, the number of public school librarians
in the United States dropped from 54,445 to 50,300, a nearly 8
percent reduction.1 Over that time, it became clear to me, and to
Joanna Freeman is a teacher librarian at Ridgecrest Elementary School in
Shoreline, Washington. Previously, she worked as a fifth-grade teacher, an
elementary school reading specialist, and a teacher of English language
learners in Japan. She has worked in education for nearly 20 years.
32
many librarians, that most people do not understand the role
librarians play in our schools—and we need to correct these
misunderstandings.
Today, when I am asked what I do, I say, “I am a teacher librarian in an elementary school.” This response invites inquisitive
looks and questions about my job, giving me the opportunity to
educate people about what teacher librarians do in thousands of
schools. I am putting the “teacher” part of my job ahead of the
“librarian” part, though they are intertwined throughout my day.
After all, I am a librarian, but I am also a teacher—a teacher of
students, staff, families, and community members.
First, I must acknowledge the many different job titles for this
position around the country: school librarian, library media
specialist, information technology specialist, research technology
specialist, and library media coordinator, just to name a few. In
recent Washington state legislation, people in my position are
referred to as “teacher librarians,” so I now use the term to avoid
confusion and because I think it better characterizes my job. Over
the years, the position has changed from primarily a traditional
librarian position to a balance of teaching and librarianship, and
I think it’s important to acknowledge that evolution.
When I was considering becoming a teacher librarian, I was
encouraged by other librarians to first become a classroom
teacher, so I would better understand the needs of both staff and
students as a librarian. I took their advice, and I enjoyed teaching
in the classroom immensely, but I still had the goal of being a
librarian. I entered the Master of Library and Information Science
program at the University of Washington and was hired as an
elementary teacher librarian in 2002 in Washington’s Shoreline
School District. This is the suburban district just north of Seattle
that I had attended as a child. I have taught in the same school
since being hired, despite school closures, tough economic times,
and the loss of many teacher librarian positions around the country, and I feel lucky to have remained in the same position without
a reduction in my hours.
The five years I spent as a classroom teacher have been invaluable to me. I gained great insight into teachers and their classrooms, including teachers’ stresses and concerns, and their joys
mation to parent organizations about copyright information,
Internet awareness and safety, book clubs, and how to help children find engaging books.
My elementary school has approximately 565 students in 23
classes, including several special education and gifted classrooms.
In the course of a school day, I teach four or more 45-minute
classes. During this time, I spend 30 to 35 minutes on instruction,
and 10 to 15 minutes helping students find books to check out,
which I also consider to be time spent teaching. Every class
attends one session each week, though the library is open all day
for drop-in visits by students and staff. I have some flexible time
to teach outside of scheduled classes, which I do through collaborating with classroom teachers. I also leave the library to teach in
the computer lab or individual classrooms when appropriate.
School library positions have
evolved, but our main focus
has not changed.
and victories. I am aware of the incredible amount of content a
teacher is expected to cover in a short amount of time. I understand the difficulty of finding interesting and appropriate materials for a classroom filled with students of different reading
abilities and interests. And I can understand the importance of
celebrating with teachers when they have breakthroughs with
their students.
My previous classroom experience directly transfers to my
school library, as the library is my classroom all day, every day.
But my student roster far exceeds the number of students an
elementary classroom teacher interacts with. On average, I teach
more than 500 students each year, from kindergarten to sixth
grade, who come to school with a range of abilities and experiences with books and reading.
School library positions have evolved over the past few
decades, primarily as a result of technological advances, but our
main focus has not changed: providing curriculum support and
teaching research and technology skills, literature appreciation,
information literacy, and Internet awareness. In my school, we
have a computer lab, roving laptop carts, and more than 250 classroom laptops, including one laptop per student in our fifth and
sixth grades. To that end, I provide a lot of hardware and software
support throughout the day, but I try not to let those technical
tasks take over my time. Parents also ask for help in supporting
their children’s education, and teacher librarians often offer infor-
A Collaborative Hub
In my library classes, I cover many topics, including literature
appreciation, Internet awareness and safety, research skills,
effective searching techniques, copyright and plagiarism, how to
cite sources, and how to find books on particular topics in the
library, and I integrate my lessons with the classroom curriculum
as often as possible. The class time I’m scheduled to teach is
precious; as a result of mandated testing days and holidays, I teach
each class an average of 30 times in a school year, for a total of
about 900 minutes of instruction, or 15 hours. Achieving the outcomes I expect for each grade level while also connecting the
library lessons with the curriculum so that I do not teach in isolation is difficult under these time constraints.
In my district, curriculum design is left up to individual
teacher librarians, though the district’s librarians meet monthly
to discuss our teaching and share resources. Many of us rely on
combining various sources—such as standards related to information literacy and technology skills from the American Association of School Librarians, the Common Core State Standards, and
the International Society for Technology in Education Standards—and we draw upon our knowledge of students and curriculum and the needs of teachers. The freedom to design our
own curriculum enables teacher librarians to work closely with
teachers in their schools to integrate library skills and knowledge
into the actual grade-level curriculum.
33
To connect library learning with classroom learning, I partner
with the teachers in my school. For instance, third-grade students
studying rocks and minerals need me to help them identify and
pull books from the library so they can research the topic in their
classrooms. A sixth-grade teacher expecting students to research
ancient civilizations will ask me to teach a lesson on how to effectively search online and find relevant, appropriate, and credible
sources for their projects. Fifth-grade students hosting our school’s
colonial fair need books and research tips to pull together their
presentations. Second-grade students studying insects need help
creating digital presentations, so I provide support in the computer
lab as they learn to use presentation tools such as PowerPoint, and
I teach a lesson on how to cite text and image sources.
Such requests happen throughout the school year and succeed
thanks to open communication between classroom teachers and
myself. Mutual respect and a firm understanding of how we can
help and support each other and our students are critical to this
kind of collaboration. Positive collaboration happens when teachers trust that the other educators they work with will keep their
perfect book for their science fiction genre study or show them
where to find the citation for a website they are using. I also help
teachers find appropriate books on a specific topic to bring back
to their individual classrooms for a few weeks so students have
materials readily available for research.
In addition to the time teacher librarians spend with students
and teachers, it is critical they have time to manage the library
itself, which is often a misunderstood part of the job. Teacher
librarians need time to do research, read reviews, purchase
appropriate resources, and have the resources processed and
available when teachers and students need them. They often
write grants to support the curriculum and invite authors or
illustrators to visit their schools and work with children. And they
need to keep up on recent developments in both technology and
materials, which many do through reading journal articles, blogs,
and other online content, and by attending conferences and
workshops. Being up to date on new ideas and programs is not
enough; teacher librarians also need time to learn how to use and
apply the programs, as well as time to share them with teachers
and students.
Many districts have cut school library positions, so it is not
uncommon for teacher librarians to have to drive from school to
school throughout the week, with just enough time to teach a few
classes before they have to leave and go to the next school. This is
a grueling schedule that leaves little time to attend to other important management and professional aspects of the job. Some
schools in Washington state employ a teacher librarian only one
day a week, so the librarian ends up working at five different
schools, without time to collaborate with teachers or determine
what materials should be purchased to best support classroom
instruction.
Supplementing the Curriculum
students’ best interests in mind. We are all working together to
support and teach our students, as well as to support each other.
These partnerships work well when teachers think of the
library as the hub, or the heart, of the school. While some people
think of a school library as simply a place to check out books or
learn a lesson on the Dewey Decimal System, the teachers I work
with recognize that libraries are vibrant spaces where a lot happens simultaneously: students can hear a good story, find out
about a new author, research their new pet, among other things.
Just as the library is a resource for materials, books, and technology, the teacher librarian is a resource for helping in the
teaching of research and reading. Questions and ideas flow into
the library, and answers and support flow out into our classrooms
and communities.
As I mentioned earlier, librarians think of their library as their
classroom, albeit with more flexibility than a standard classroom.
Our library is open throughout the school day, and students
trickle in to borrow books and find resources for projects. If I am
not teaching a class, I am available to help them choose that
34
Supplementing the school’s curriculum requires that I have at
least some knowledge of it at all grade levels. This is difficult, especially at a time when every publisher seems to be releasing new
materials aligned to the Common Core State Standards (CCSS).
My district has recently purchased or will be purchasing new curricula in science, math, and reading. I have asked to be included
in appropriate trainings for new curricula so I can have some
knowledge of the topics being taught in each class, but that is not
always possible due to time or cost. I know a disconnect between
a new curriculum and the library program often leads to a more
difficult transition for teachers, as teacher librarians scramble to
catch up and provide appropriate resources or lessons in the
library. I am, however, doing my best to support teachers during
this move to the CCSS.
With the new standards finding a foothold in most states, their
focus on nonfiction will bring renewed attention to school library
collections, particularly to outdated nonfiction sections. Teachers
piloting a new reading curriculum in my school have already
asked me for materials to supplement their instruction. As teacher
librarians, we must have the time and resources necessary to support teachers throughout the adoption of the CCSS; we can’t rely
only on the appendices of the new standards. If we really want to
increase both the quantity and the quality of the nonfiction our
students read, teacher librarians need time to find these materials
and the funding to purchase them.
Several years ago, my district’s social studies curriculum
changed to include the study of ancient civilizations in the sixth
grade. At that time, I had very few books in the wide variety of
reading levels and topics needed for up to 90 students to use the
resources at the same time. My five or six books about mummies
and King Tut were not going to cut it. I needed books about
China, Mesopotamia, India, and other cultures to provide the
breadth of understanding my teachers and students required.
Their needs informed my book purchasing and budget prioritizing for the next few years, but it took time and my knowledge of
the curriculum to order the right materials, and I continue to
add to that collection as time and money allows. A school
library’s collection is never complete.
Now our sixth-grade students study ancient civilizations
throughout the year, which culminates with a state-mandated
Classroom-Based Assessment in social studies. Students read and
do research from multiple sources to answer an essential question
about a civilization, and they must include at least three sources,
including primary and secondary sources, in their bibliography.
work or develop new projects. Teachers are flexible, but a major
change involves other teachers as well, and collaboration
between teachers and the teacher librarian can stall as everyone
gains familiarity with the new curriculum.
For several years, our second-grade students studied insects
in science, and the teachers embraced this topic and used it to
teach across the curriculum, incorporating reading, writing, and
technology skills. I planned lessons with them, and they encouraged me to be an integral part of the process. After a few years of
working together to create materials and plan the unit, we became
comfortable enough to meet only a few times before and during
the unit, and then after to assess student projects. The teaching
happened in the classroom, the library, and the computer lab. The
students asked questions, researched a chosen insect, and then
created a presentation. They had multiple teachers throughout
the process, and we all worked together toward the same goal.
For my part, I gathered materials online and in books and
encyclopedias, limiting the choices of insects so students could
focus on the research process and not have to spend hours trying
Partnerships between teacher
librarians and classroom teachers
work well when classroom
teachers think of the library as the
hub, or the heart, of the school.
At the request of the teachers, I support this research by teaching lessons either in the classroom or in the library, depending on
schedules. I teach several lessons focusing on primary sources,
and one or two about effective online searching, refreshing students’ memories about a topic I introduced to them in earlier
grades.
My partnership with the sixth-grade teachers developed over
the years as we all grew more comfortable with the curriculum,
and as I better understood how I could support students’ preparation for this assessment. At first, when the curriculum and
assessment were put into place, the teachers and I would engage
in lengthy discussions. But now, when the teachers are ready to
introduce this topic, we simply have a short conversation or
exchange a quick email, since we are all comfortable with our
roles in the students’ learning.
It takes time for teachers to learn a new curriculum, but after
a year or two, they can make it their own. Classroom teachers
create projects to enhance the curriculum, and when a curriculum change occurs, they must find ways to incorporate their
to find information about an obscure insect. I helped students
craft their questions, and worked with the classroom teachers
to help students understand nonfiction text features, so they
could find information easily using the index, captions, and
table of contents. I supported the students’ work in the computer
lab next door to the library, and made myself available along
with their teachers to help them create a slideshow presentation,
including an interactive quiz they shared with each other.
Such collaborations with classroom teachers can happen in
a variety of ways. Sometimes I approach classroom teachers after
I become aware of a particular aspect of their curriculum or an
impending project. I then suggest ways I can support them and
their students with materials or teaching, or both. And sometimes teachers approach me with ideas or questions. The interaction depends upon the personality of the teacher and his or
her willingness to ask for support. I also need to be seen as
someone who is willing to collaborate in classrooms, and I need
to be visible around the building as a reminder that I am available and willing to work with teachers.
35
The recent emphasis on working in professional learning communities has created a positive culture in my school and district,
and I am pleasantly surprised that new teachers frequently ask
me to work with them and provide resources and ideas. The culture of a building and a district can encourage collaboration, and
in the past, I have sometimes had difficulties in getting teachers
to work with me. But recently, a deliberate focus on collaboration
in our district has fostered the idea that the students in our school
belong to all of the staff, not just their classroom teachers, and that
we are all responsible for their learning. Teachers are encouraged
to think beyond the walls of their classrooms and seek outside
opinions and ideas, including those of specialists, such as teacher
librarians. This push to work together has resulted in greater communication among teachers and has encouraged everyone to talk
about our teaching and our students.
Making Time and Connections
For all teachers, having enough time—a prerequisite of collaboration—is a constant struggle. Some districts have built collaboration
time into their schedules through an early release afternoon once
a week or a late start once a month. But this time, however, is often
scheduled for building, grade-level, or department meetings. In
some districts, the teacher librarian and specialists in physical
education, art, and music teach classes so that classroom teachers
at the same grade level can meet during common planning time to
collaborate on lesson plans and improve their instruction.
While these are very important opportunities for teacher
collaboration, how does a specialist find time to meet with a
classroom teacher? In my case, collaborations with teachers
are almost never scheduled. Most of my planning happens in
short bursts: five- to 10-minute chats in a classroom or hallway
while students are at recess. Collegial planning time set aside
by my district does not facilitate all the communication necessary for collaboration, as every staff member needs more time
than is available. Teachers must meet with other teachers in
the same grade level, as well as with those who teach in other
grade levels and those who teach like subjects. There is no time
for a classroom teacher to have a weekly or monthly scheduled
36
meeting with the teacher librarian, or the art teacher, or the
music teacher. Sometimes I can ask for a few minutes in a
grade-level meeting, but agendas are so full of reviewing student data and assessments and aligning curricula, among other
topics, that they hardly fit into an hour, so I try not to impose
on that time.
The idea of having an hourlong meeting where a teacher and I
plan a unit down to the last detail is not realistic. Emails can take
the place of several conversations. When a teacher sends me the
student instructions for a project, I can look through them for
important information to support the teacher and students. Stopping to visit a classroom at the end of the day, or sending my schedule to a teacher so she can find a common free time when I can
teach in her classroom, takes just a few minutes and is less intrusive
to a busy classroom teacher. In my experience, keeping it simple
leads to greater success.
For instance, when a fifth-grade teacher stopped by my desk and
mentioned that her students would be studying the 13 colonies
and then giving presentations, she left me a copy of the handout
the students were going to receive explaining the project. She asked
me to consider what kind of support I could give her and the students, and then left to return to her classroom. Our meeting was not
a formal one; it lasted less than three minutes. But it gave me
enough time to think through my response, and we continued the
conversation later, both in person and via email. I emailed her
relevant websites, scheduled a time to teach a lesson in her room
about effective online searching, and gathered materials on the
colonies that her students could use in their classroom for a few
weeks. This level of involvement did not require a long meeting or
discussion.
T
o connect with classroom teachers, I make an effort to get
outside of the library and stop by classrooms. If I expect
teachers to want to connect with me, I need to work to
connect with them as well. Often this is how I find out
about projects or ideas that I can support. I might stop by a class
that is starting to examine rocks and minerals from science kits, and
a student’s question sparks the idea that these students need a set
of books in their classroom for a few weeks so they can expand their
reading and research beyond what is in the science unit.
Just as important as working closely with classroom teachers is
working closely with students. I listen to their questions and book
recommendations, and survey them to find out their interests and
backgrounds. I use this information to engage all students in what
is happening in the library. I want to not only provide them with
books, but also help them understand that the library and what we
learn here will help them throughout their school careers. Every
time I don’t have a book a child requests, every time I fail to show a
child how to find the answer to a question, I lose an opportunity to
make a connection between the student and the library. I work my
hardest with students who continually turn down my book suggestions in hopes that someday they will take a book, read it, enjoy it,
and realize that the library might actually contain something they
would like to read. When that happens, it’s a victory not just for me,
but for libraries—and teacher librarians—everywhere.
☐
Endnote
1. American Library Association, “The State of America’s Libraries, 2013,” special issue,
American Libraries, 2013, 28.
For Grown-Ups Too
By Seth Lerer
E
ver since there were children, there has been children’s
literature. Long before John Newbery established the first
press devoted to children’s books, stories were told and
written for the young, and books originally offered to
mature readers were carefully recast or excerpted for youthful
audiences. Greek and Roman educational traditions grounded
themselves in reading and reciting poetry and drama. Aesop’s
fables lived for two millennia on classroom and family shelves.
And thinkers from Quintilian to John Locke, from St. Augustine to
Dr. Seuss, speculated on the ways in which we learn about our
language and our lives from literature.
The history of children’s literature is inseparable from the history of childhood, for the child was made through texts and tales
he or she studied, heard, and told back. Learning how to read is a
Seth Lerer is Distinguished Professor of Literature and former Dean of Arts
and Humanities at the University of California, San Diego. He has authored
numerous articles and books, including his recent memoir of childhood,
Prospero’s Son: Life, Books, Love, and Theater. This article is excerpted
with permission from his book Children’s Literature: A Reader’s History
from Aesop to Harry Potter (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008).
lifetime, and life-defining, experience. “We can remember,” writes
Francis Spufford in his exquisite memoir The Child That Books
Built, “readings that acted like transformations. There were times
when a particular book, like a seed crystal, dropped into our
minds when they were exactly ready for it, like a supersaturated
solution, and suddenly we changed.”1 Children’s literature offers
more than just a chronicle of forms of fiction or the arts of illustration. It charts the makings of the literate imagination. It shows
children finding worlds within the book and books in the world.
It addresses the changing environments of family life and human
growth, schooling and scholarship, publishing and publicity in
which children—at times suddenly, at times subtly—found themselves changed by literature.2
But what is childhood? Ever since French historian Philippe
Ariès sought to define its modern form, scholars have sought to
write its history. For Ariès, childhood was not some essential or
eternal quality in human life but was instead a category of existence shaped by social mores and historical experience.
Childhood was not invented by the moderns—whether we
associate them with John Locke, the Puritans, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the Romantics, or the Victorians—but is a shifting category
that has meaning in relationship to other stages of personal devel-
37
ILLUSTRATIONS BY LIZA FLORES
The Surprising Depth and Complexity of Children’s Literature
opment and family life. Greeks and Romans, Byzantines and
Anglo-Saxons, Renaissance and Revolutionary cultures all had
clearly defined concepts of the child and, in turn, canons of children’s literature. Children are or become, in the words of the 20thcentury philosopher Marx Wartofsky, “what they are taken to be
by others, and what they come to take themselves to be, in the
course of their social communication and interaction with others.”3 So, too, is children’s literature: books that are taken into
childhood, that foster social communication, and that, in their
interaction with their readers, owners, sellers, and collectors,
teach and please.
Children’s literature offers more than
just a chronicle of forms of fiction or
the arts of illustration. It charts the
makings of the literate imagination.
I am interested in the history of what children have heard and
read. Their stories, poems, plays, or treatises may well have been
composed with children in mind; or they may have been adapted
for readers of different ages. I distinguish, therefore, between
claims that children’s literature consists of books written for children and that it consists of those read, regardless of original authorial intention, by children.
A Matter of Interpretation
At the beginning of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince,
the narrator recalls how, as a 6-year-old, he came across a picture
38
of a boa constrictor swallowing an animal. “I pondered deeply,”
he remembers, and he made his own drawing. Showing it to the
grown-ups, he asked if it frightened them, but they responded,
“Why should anyone be frightened by a hat?” Of course, this was
not a hat, but a boa constrictor digesting an elephant. The boy
redrew the picture, showing the inside, but the grown-ups were
not impressed. And so, the boy gave up a career as an artist.
“Grown-ups never understand anything by themselves, and it is
tiresome for children to be always and forever explaining things
to them.”4
This episode represents two ways of reading literature. On the
one hand, we may look for what it seems to us; on the other, we
may look for what its author meant it to be. The unimaginative will
always see the ordinary in the strange, a hat where there may really
be a snake digesting an elephant. Part of the challenge for the literary critic, therefore, is to balance authorial intention and reader
response. But part of the challenge for the children’s literary critic
is to recognize that texts are mutable—that meanings change, that
different groups of readers may see different things, and that what
grown-ups find as ordinary items of experience may transform,
in the child’s imagination, into monstrous brilliance.
Some readers have found children’s literature to be a rack of
hats: didactic, useful books that keep us warm or guard us against
weather. I find children’s literature to be a world of snakes: seductive things that live in undergrowths and that may take us whole.
Like the Little Prince, I have come upon volumes that have swallowed me. Children’s literature is full of animals, whether they are
the creatures who fill Aesop’s old menagerie or the islands and
continents of the colonial imagination. But they are also full of
hats, from Crusoe’s crude goatskin head covering to the red-andwhite-striped topper that covers, only barely, the transgressions
of Dr. Seuss’s famous Cat. Each item is a subject of interpretation.
Each becomes something of a litmus test for just what kind of
reader we may be.
Studies of authorial intention have, over the past three decades,
lost ground to histories of reception that show how the meaning
of a literary work often lies in the ways in which it may be used,
taught, read, excerpted, copied, and sold.5 Children’s literature
retells a history of the conventions of interpretation and the reception of texts in different historical periods. But children’s literary
works themselves take such a problem as a theme. Often, a book
instructs the child in the arts of reading. It may tell tales about its
own production, or it may—more figuratively—show us how we
transform our lives into books and texts, making sense of signs
and symbols, life and letters.
I am thus fascinated by the transformations of key books and
authors over time. The trajectory of Aesop’s fables, for example,
writes a history of Western education, of family life, of languages,
translations, manuscripts, printing, and digitization. The reception and recasting of Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, too, illustrates the
changing visions of adventure and imagination, not just in the
English-speaking countries and their colonies, but throughout
Europe, Asia, and the Americas. The schoolroom has remained
the setting for children’s literature from Greek and Roman antiquity to the present. St. Augustine recalled, in his Confessions, how
he had to memorize parts of the Aeneid as a schoolboy. Medieval
and Renaissance classrooms filled themselves with Aesop. Eighteenth-century girls found their experience recast in Sarah Field-
ing’s The Governess, subtitled The Little Female Academy. Boys
from Tom Brown to Harry Potter found their most imaginative
adventures in the classroom, the library, or the playing field.
In the course of these tales, I find themes that mark defining
moments in literary history. Lists and catalogs, for example, seem
to govern everything from the excerpts of Homer in Hellenistic
papyri, to the medieval and Renaissance alphabets, to Crusoe’s
inventories, Scrooge’s double-entry bookkeeping, and the contents of the “great green room” of Goodnight Moon. Simply repeating lists of things—arranged alphabetically, chronologically, or
topically—can offer unexpected associations. Every list is, potentially, a reckoning, and in the history of children’s literature, lists
offer an accountancy of growth. Children’s books often illuminate
or criticize an actuarial approach to life. What Scrooge learns in
A Christmas Carol, for example, is to stop making accounts—to
recognize that moral reckoning is not the same as monetary, and
that inscription in the book of life is not to be confused with
entries in the ledger. By contrast, many 20th-century children’s
books teach the idea of list-making. What is Goodnight Moon but
a catalog of things: a list of properties both real and fanciful that
mark the progress of the evening and the passageway to sleep? Dr.
Seuss transforms the list into a wild burlesque of reckoning itself,
imagining an alphabet “on beyond zebra,” or a fauna far beyond
the categories of Linnaean classification.6
If children’s literature seems full of lists, it also seems full of
theater. The schoolroom from the age of St. Augustine to Shakespeare was a place of performance, as boys memorized, recited,
and enacted classic texts and rhetorical arguments for the approval
of the master. The playing fields of the Rugby School in England
or the battlefields of Africa were, for the 19th century, great stages
for the masculine imagination. Young women, too, put on their
shows—but here, the audiences were more often domestic than
martial. Spectacula theatrica, the spectacle of theater, captivated
young Augustine. It also captivated young Louisa May Alcott, who
had aspired to an actress’s life and who began her Little Women
with a little holiday play put on by the March sisters. The theater
enticed Pinocchio, too, whose puppet life is derailed by the strange
seductions of the showcase (the Disney version of the story even
has its Fox, duded up like some vulpine David Belasco, sing, “An
Actor’s Life for Me”), and part of my interest lies in the ways in
which the literary child performs for others.
If there has been a theater of childhood, especially in the modern era, it has been due in large part to Shakespeare. Plays such
as A Midsummer Night’s Dream, characters such as Juliet and
Ophelia, and figures such as Caliban had a great impact on the
makings of children’s literature. Shakespeare was everywhere, and
his figurations of the fairy world, his presentations of young boys
and girls, and his imagination of the monstrous gave a texture to
those works of children’s literature that aspired to high culture.
By the mid-19th century, childhood itself could take on a Shakespearean cast: witness the popularity of Mary Cowden Clarke’s
fanciful re-creations in The Girlhood of Shakespeare’s Heroines;
witness Anne Shirley in L. M. Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables,
acting out like Juliet; witness the weird soliloquies of Captain
Hook, who comes off in J. M. Barrie’s play of Peter Pan as a Shakespearean manqué.
The world was a stage, but it also was a book, and in particular
it was a book of nature. Technology and science had an impact on
the child’s imagination long before the chemistry sets and Edison biographies of my own childhood. Medieval bestiaries,
herbaries, and lapidaries often offered illustrated guides to God’s
creation (each item pictured, described, and then allegorized
into moral meaning). The great explorations of the 17th and 18th
centuries prompted new places of imagined transport—there is
a direct line from Crusoe’s island to Maurice Sendak’s Where the
Wild Things Are. In the 19th century, the work of Charles Darwin
had a deep impress on the narratives of childhood. Did children
now evolve? Could they devolve, by contrast, left to their own
uncontrolled devices? And who knew whether and where new
species would be found? From Charles Kingsley and Edward Lear,
The schoolroom has remained
the setting for children’s literature
from Greek and Roman antiquity
to the present.
through Rudyard Kipling and H. G. Wells, to Dr. Seuss, the endless
wonder of the world transformed itself into new creatures, new
adventures, and new timelines of development.
Philology, the study of word histories, of medieval myths, finds
its way into the children’s literary imagination, from the Grimm
brothers’ fairy tales, through J. R. R. Tolkien’s Middle Earth and
C. S. Lewis’s Narnia, to Philip Pullman’s Miltonic His Dark Materials. The tradition of the fairy tale is part and parcel of this philological tradition. The Grimms had originally begun to collect their
Märchen as part of their larger project of recovering the sources
of Germanic linguistic and literary culture. Tolkien, the Oxford
39
etymologist, found sources for his magical vocabulary in the roots
of English. There is a mystery to meanings in the dictionary, and
fairy tales and folklore share in larger national and scholarly projects that imagine a childhood for the European peoples.
For a long time, what was not literature was the ephemeral, the
popular, the feminine, the childish. National literary histories
tended to ignore women writers, to slight the role of the popular
press or the folktale, and to brush aside works of wide circulation
that nonetheless did not seem to match the greatness of known
authors. In response to these critical traditions, histories of children’s literature have tended in the opposite direction: instead of
analyzing, they celebrate; instead of discriminating, they list.
There is no single golden age,
no moment when the literature
for and of children is better than
at any other moment.
A Golden Age?
We have long sought a golden age of children’s literature.7 Yet
there is no single golden age, no moment when the literature for
and of children is better, more precise, or more effective than at
any other moment. Children’s literature is not some ideal category
that a certain age may reach and that another may miss. It is
instead a kind of system, one whose social and aesthetic value is
determined out of the relationships among those who make,
market, and read books. No single work of literature is canonical;
rather, works attain canonical status through their participation
in a system of literary values.8 At stake is not, say, why Alice in
40
Wonderland is somehow better than the books of Mrs. Molesworth, or why the many imitations of Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe
never quite measure up to their famous model. What is at stake,
instead, is how successive periods define the literary for both
children and adults, and how certain works and authors were
established in the households, schools, personal collections, and
libraries of the time.
If the history of children’s literature builds on current cultural
and theoretical concerns, it also speaks to commerce. Even before
Newbery set up shop in the mid-18th century, there was a book
trade, and scribes, publishers, and editors included books for
children in their inventories (it is significant that virtually every
early printer throughout Europe published an Aesop as one of his
first volumes). Newbery himself grounded his booklist in the
educational theories of John Locke, and the British and American
trade in children’s books kept up his emphases for decades. In
France, the city of Rouen became a center for the children’s book
trade in the 18th century, and by the late 19th the Paris firm of
Pierre-Jules Hetzel set a standard for the making and the marketing of books for younger readers (Hetzel was Jules Verne’s and
Alexandre Dumas’s publisher, and he put out the French translations of Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe and James Fenimore Cooper’s Last
of the Mohicans).9 And in America, once public libraries became
established, once prizes for children’s literature were funded,
once children’s authors became arbiters of taste and tie-ins, children’s literature became a public business.
Children’s books are now the most profitable area of publishing, and links between traditional and innovative media establish
younger readers as the prime market for imaginative writing.
European and American demographics, too, point to a rise in the
number of school-age children and a corresponding interest
among parents not just for new books to read, but for a sense of
history to children’s reading. Hardly a day goes by when I do not
read of somebody rediscovering a “classic” book or author for a
new audience. Such accounts reveal, too, how the categories of
the children’s book are codified not just by writers and readers,
but by book sellers, librarians, and publishing houses. To a large
degree, the 20th-century history of children’s literature is a story
of those institutions: of medals and awards, reflecting social
mores and commercial needs; of tie-ins, toys, and replications, in
a range of media, of characters from children’s books. Such media
phenomena attest not only to the governing commodity economy
in which the children’s book now sits. They also constitute a form
of literary reception in their own right. The history of reading
perennially links together commerce and interpretation.
The history of reading is also the history of teaching, and children’s literature is an academic discipline.10 Beginning in the
1970s, children’s literature became the object of formal study and
the subject of professional inquiry. Part of this rise was spurred
by the new modes of social history of the time. The emergence of
family history as a discipline worked in tandem with the emphasis
on first-generation feminist scholarship to seek out texts and
authors unmarked by the traditional canon. So, the acts of telling
stories, writing books, or entertaining and instructing children
came to be appreciated as acts of authorship.11 These developments in social history had a profound impact on the direction of
children’s literature in academia. The study of children’s literature
is cultural studies, not just in that it draws on literary, socio-
each goodnight. … The sense of an ending descends gradually, like sleep.12
And yet, that ending is also a beginning. Marcus calls attention, in his analysis that follows, to relationships between the
children’s catalog and the structures of fiction generally, alluding in particular to Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
What I have come to realize is that our own acts of reading are
thus educations in the arts of language: in the ways in which our
words construct, reveal, or occlude the world of experience; in
the power of words read and spoken to present a room familiar
and yet always richly strange.
As the historian Roger Chartier puts it, “Reading is not just an
abstract operation of intellect: it is an engagement of the body,
an inscription in space, a relation of oneself and others.”13 If there
is a future to children’s literature, it must lie in the artifacts of
writing and the place of reading in the home and in the school.
To understand the history of children’s literature is to understand
the history of all our forms of literary experience.
☐
Endnotes
1. Francis Spufford, The Child That Books Built: A Life in Reading (London: Faber, 2002), 9.
Our own acts of reading
are educations in the arts
of language.
historical, and economic methods of analysis, but in that it may
serve as a test case for the syntheses of current cultural criticism.
As a result, the discipline of children’s literature now flourishes
in academia.
E
ven the most ordinary prose becomes magical when read
aloud at home or at school. And even the simplest-seeming of our children’s books teaches something elegant and
deep. Perhaps the first book I read to my son was Goodnight Moon, and in its catalog of little objects, its repetitive idiom,
and its lulling rhythm, I found something that I later learned others
had seen within it. Leonard Marcus, writing in his biography of that
book’s author, Margaret Wise Brown, suggestively analyzes the
book’s form and power in ways I had felt palpably.
A little elegy and a small child’s evening prayer, Goodnight
Moon is a supremely comforting evocation of the companionable objects of the daylight world. It is also a ritual preparation for a journey beyond that world, a leave-taking of the
known for the unknown world of darkness and dreams. It is
spoken in part in the voice of the provider, the good parent
or guardian who can summon forth a secure, whole existence
simply by naming its particulars. … And it is partly spoken in
the voice of the child, who takes possession of that world by
naming its particulars all over again, addressing them
directly, one by one, as though each were alive, and bidding
2. On the rise of what I have elsewhere called biblio-autobiography (that is, the chronicle
of life told in terms of books read), see my “Epilogue: Falling Asleep over the History of the
Book,” PMLA 121 (2006): 229–234. Besides Spufford’s memoir, another brilliant version of
this kind of narrative is Alberto Manguel, A History of Reading (New York: Knopf, 1999),
and also his A Reading Diary (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004).
3. Marx Wartofsky, “The Child’s Construction of the World and the World’s Construction
of the Child: From Historical Epistemology to Historical Psychology,” in The Child and
Other Cultural Inventions, ed. Frank S. Kessel and Alexander W. Sigel (New York: Praeger,
1983), 190.
4. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince, trans. Katherine Woods (New York:
Harcourt, Brace and World, 1943), 1–3.
5. For the critical traditions centering on reader response theory and the history of literary
reception, see Hans Robert Jauss, Toward an Aesthetic of Reception, trans. Timothy Bahti
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1981); Susan R. Suleiman and Inge Crosman,
eds., The Reader In the Text (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980); Seth Lerer,
Chaucer and His Readers: Imagining the Author in Late-Medieval England (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 1993); and James L. Machor and Philip Goldstein, eds.,
Reception Study: From Literary Theory to Cultural Studies (New York: Routledge, 2001).
6. See Seth Lerer, “Children’s Literature and the Stories of the List,” Yale Review 89, no. 1
(2001): 25–40.
7. Recent studies that still imagine a golden age of children’s literature (invariably, Britain
from the 1860s to the 1920s) include Humphrey Carpenter, Secret Gardens: A Study of
the Golden Age of Children’s Literature (London: Allen and Unwin, 1985); and Peter Hunt,
An Introduction to Children’s Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994). But note,
too, the application of this phrase to the postwar period in Peter Hollindale and Zena
Sutherland, “Internationalism, Fantasy, and Realism, 1945–1970,” in Children’s Literature:
An Illustrated History, ed. Peter Hunt (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 256–260.
8. I appropriate this formulation from John Guillory, which he set out in his “Canonical and
Non-Canonical: A Critique of the Current Debate,” ELH: A Journal of English Literary
History 54 (1987): 483–527, and developed in his Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary
Canon Formation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993).
9. See Michel Manson, “Continuités et ruptures dans l’édition du livre pour la jeunesse à
Rouen, de 1700 à 1900,” Revue française d’histoire du livre 82 (1994): 93–126; Francis
Marcoin, “La fiction pour enfants au XIXe siècle,” Revue française d’histoire du livre 82
(1994): 127–144; and, more generally, Christian Robin, ed., Un éditeur et son siècle:
Pierre-Jules Hetzel (1814–1886) (Saint-Sébastien, France: Société Crocus, 1988).
10. See Beverly Lyon Clark, Kiddie Lit: The Cultural Construction of Children’s Literature in
America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), especially her bibliographical
survey of the teaching, study, and criticism of the discipline, which can be found on pages
239–246.
11. The spur to a good deal of late 20th-century work in family history came from
Lawrence Stone, especially his groundbreaking The Family, Sex and Marriage in England,
1500–1800 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1977), and the many studies written in its
wake. Works that have sought to relocate the role of mother and child in the family and in
literature include Ellen Seiter, Sold Separately: Children and Parents in Consumer Culture
(New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1993); Anne Higonnet, Pictures of
Innocence: The History and Crisis of Ideal Childhood (London: Thames and Hudson, 1998);
and Eve Bannet, The Domestic Revolution: Enlightenment Feminisms and the Novel
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000).
12. Leonard Marcus, Margaret Wise Brown: Awakened by the Moon (Boston: Beacon
Press, 1992), 187.
13. Roger Chartier, The Order of Books: Readers, Authors, and Libraries in Europe between
the Fourteenth and the Eighteenth Centuries, trans. Lydia Cochrane (Stanford, CA:
Stanford University Press, 1994), 20.
41
SHARE MY LESSON
“No Teacher Should Be
Forced to Plan Alone”
SOME OF THE MOST highly rated resources
on Share My Lesson were created by
classroom teachers in Boston, backed by
their union and grants from the AFT
Innovation Fund. Their project, called 21st
Century Lessons, took off one recent
summer in teacher Tracy Young’s dining
room, as teachers designed a collaborative
process to produce top-quality materials.
The teachers knew just what they
wanted to make: a full package of PowerPoint lessons, assessments, handouts, and
activities that would take fellow educators
no more than 30 minutes of prep time to
teach. And the group had very high
standards. The lessons had to be aligned to
the Common Core State Standards and
flexible enough for users to modify them. If
they could create such lessons, then other
teachers wouldn’t be forced to plan lessons
alone, from scratch—hence the group’s
motto, “No teacher should be forced to plan
alone.”
“The feedback has been: ‘This is exactly
what I’ve been looking for,’” says Ted
Chambers, a social studies teacher at the
Edwards Middle School in Boston and a
codirector of 21st Century Lessons. “In a
secular way, this is sort of like a Christmas
present—you open it up and you weep
with joy because you’ve finally found what
you need.”
Chambers and Young, colleagues at
Edwards, put together a
talented team of Boston
Teachers Union (BTU) members
and a careful process for lesson
production. The work began at Young’s
house and then moved into public schools
that could provide space for the group.
Some teachers served as curriculum
directors, helping to identify which standards would be addressed in each lesson.
Others worked as lesson designers, who
submitted their work to members of their
team for review. Designers had to revise
their lessons, based on team feedback, until
everyone signed off. Other team members
took care of technology, making the
attractive PowerPoints—the lessons that
teachers can click on and teach—that
Chambers and Young believe are a big part
of 21st Century Lessons’ success.
“BTU members are dedicated to
providing the highest-quality education to
the children of Boston,” says BTU President
Richard Stutman. “We are proud to support
21st Century Lessons so that teachers can
access—and children can benefit from—lessons produced by some of the most talented
and dedicated public school teachers in the
country.”
To date, the team has created middle
school lessons in mathematics, social studies,
and English language arts. The content is
very popular on Share My Lesson, with more
than 280,000 views in less than two years.
And Boston Public Schools has endorsed the
math lessons for use in city schools.
To download these lessons, visit www.
sharemylesson.com/21stCenturyLessons.
Resources are searchable by subject, grade,
and topic. Here are a few examples:
English Language Arts
Short Stories and Theme: The Lottery
(www.bit.ly/LotterySML)
This lesson helps students understand and
identify themes in a short story.
Citing Textual Evidence: Salem Witch Trials
(www.bit.ly/SMLsalem)
Students examine three different types of
primary source documents (a letter, a diary
entry, and court testimony) related to the
Salem witch trials and learn how textual
evidence supports their claims.
History: Early Civilizations
Athens and Sparta
(www.bit.ly/SMLathens)
This lesson is a series of short, independent
activities paired with group work, in which
students learn cultural differences between
Athens and Sparta by analyzing two
primary and two secondary sources.
Greek Culture: Intro to Alexander the Great
(www.bit.ly/SMLalexander)
(www.bit.ly/SMLalexander
Students read passages, answer reflective
questions, and receive whole-group
instruction in order to understand the life
of this historical figure.
Mathematics
Statistical Questions and Data
(www.bit.ly/SMLstat)
(www.bit.ly/SMLstat
Students learn about statistical questions
and data collection methods, including
organization strategies.
Introduction to Integers
(www.bit.ly/SMLintegers)
(www.bit.ly/SMLintegers
Designed to help students understand and
use positive and negative numbers, this
lesson asks students to apply math to
real-world situations.
Introduction to Solving Equations
(www.bit.ly/SMLsolve)
Students study the distributive property and
learn to combine like terms to solve simple
linear equations.
42
TOOLS FOR TEACHERS
New Accountability
adequate resources, and (3) educators’
professional capacity. Such systems are
transparent and readily understandable.
And they engage school stakeholders in
planning and implementing accountability
policies tailored to each school and district.
The AFT has joined a diverse group of
organizations by signing on to “A New
Social Compact for American Education,”
a framework for new accountability. These
organizations have committed to the
important work of implementing the
framework’s following principles in our
schools, districts, and states:
• We believe the purpose of accountability
is to improve education.
• We believe all students can learn and
achieve, and accountability must focus
on building the capacity of schools to
actualize this potential in their students.
• We believe accountability must focus on
meaningful learning.
• We believe accountability is built on a
foundation of educational knowledge
and professionalism.
• We believe accountability decisions
should be based on multiple and varied
measures that are disaggregated by
student status.
• We believe accountability must involve
students, families, educators and other
school staff, and the community in
decision-making.
To read the full statement and sign on to
the principles, see www.NewAccountability.
org. The website can help you explain to
your PTA, school board, and local newspaper
why new accountability is the way to go.
And don’t forget to spread the word on
social media!
–AFT EDUCATIONAL ISSUES DEPARTMENT
RESOURCES
12 YEARS A SLAVE TOOLKIT
ESSENTIAL EARLY READING
The National School Boards Association has partnered with New
Regency, Fox Searchlight, and Penguin Books to make copies of
the film, book, and study guide for 12 Years a Slave available to
America’s public high schools. Educators with school and district
approval to teach the film will receive a free toolkit, which
includes a DVD of the film (an edited version with parental
consent requested), a paperback copy of the book, a printed
study guide, and a letter from the film’s director, Steve McQueen.
Visit www.12yearsaslave.com to request a school toolkit.
The AFT’s Early Childhood Education Cadre, which comprises
classroom educators from around the country, has produced a
new book list to complement the popular Transitioning to
Kindergarten toolkit. Developed by the AFT and the National
Center for Learning Disabilities, Transitioning to Kindergarten
features activities to help children prepare for kindergarten,
along with tips for parents, training materials, and more. The
book list is the latest tool—offering teachers’ favorite books that
concentrate on making the transition. Both the book list and the
complete toolkit are available at http://go.aft.org/t2k.
COMMON CORE PODCASTS
The Learning First Alliance is using social media to help keep
the education community’s ear to the ground when it comes to
the Common Core State Standards. The AFT is a member of the
alliance, which is producing podcasts that explore Common
Core implementation. One recent installment featured Toledo
(Ohio) Federation of Teachers President Kevin Dalton and
Toledo Public Schools elementary school teacher Amy Whaley
discussing how the union and district worked together to
develop curriculum maps and teacher-led professional
development tied to the standards. Other podcasts have
included education researchers and the Delaware PTA president. The podcasts are available at www.learningfirst.org.
EBOLA 101
The AFT, which is the second-largest nurses union in the
United States, is working to keep communities healthy and
informed about Ebola. Visit http://go.aft.org/AE414res1 to
learn about the AFT’s plan to contain the threat. The site offers
materials for educators, including guidance for schools and
daycare centers receiving staff or students from areas affected
by the virus. The AFT’s Share My Lesson site also is offering
Ebola-related materials. The articles, lesson plans, and
activities come from experts and can help students separate
Ebola fact from fiction. They are available at http://go.aft.org/
AE414res2.
43
ILLUSTRATION BY JAMES YANG
TEST-BASED ACCOUNTABILITY is broken.
More often than not, it has become a way
to use large-scale assessments to identify and
punish struggling schools. For more than two
decades, it has failed to improve student
achievement or ensure equity in the
distribution of educational resources.
It is time for a paradigm shift.
New accountability systems should be
designed to enhance learning environments
that ensure the development of the
higher-order thinking skills students need,
improve curriculum, and increase teacher
efficacy. The system itself should be continuously improved, incorporating feedback
from parents, teachers, and students.
The most educationally accomplished
nations use accountability to support good
educational practices and to drive continuous improvement. If we are to compete with
these world-class systems, accountability in
American education must focus both on
gathering complete information on the
performance of students, educators, schools,
and districts, and on providing the feedback,
resources, and supports necessary for their
improvement.
“Support-and-improve” accountability
systems depend on three crucial elements:
(1) meaningful student learning, (2)
Restoring the Vision
(Continued from page 13)
Laboratory for Educational Improvement of the Northeast and
Islands, 1988).
19. Albert Shanker, “Convention Plots New Course: A Charter
for Change,” Where We Stand, New York Times, July 10, 1988,
Where We Stand Online Archive, http://locals.nysut.org/
shanker.
20. William Kristol, quoted in Kahlenberg, Tough Liberal, 312.
23. Ember Reichgott Junge, “1991 and 2005: Goals Then and
Now,” remarks, August 8, 2005, in Chartering 2.0 Leadership
Summit: Proceedings Document (Mackinac Island, MI: National
Alliance for Public Charter Schools, 2005), 9.
24. Richard M. Ingersoll, Teacher Turnover, Teacher Shortages,
and the Organization of Schools (Seattle: Center for the Study
of Teaching and Policy, 2001).
25. Ember Reichgott Junge, Zero Chance of Passage: The
Pioneering Charter School Story (Edina, MN: Beaver’s Pond
Press, 2012), 113.
26. Citizens League, Chartered Schools = Choices for Educators
+ Quality for All Students (Minneapolis: Citizens League, 1988).
27. Citizens League, Chartered Schools, 5.
35. Ted Kolderie, Beyond Choice to New Public Schools:
Withdrawing the Exclusive Franchise in Public Education
(Washington, DC: Progressive Policy Institute, 1990), 3.
36. Reichgott Junge, Zero Chance of Passage.
37. Sara Rimer, “Immigrants in Charter Schools Seeking the
Best of Two Worlds,” New York Times, January 10, 2009.
38. National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, Estimated
Number of Public Charter Schools.
40. Joe Nathan, Charter Schools: Creating Hope and
Opportunity for American Education (San Francisco:
Jossey-Bass, 1996), 32.
41. Priscilla Wohlstetter, Joanna Smith, and Caitlin C. Farrell,
Choices and Challenges: Charter School Performance in
Perspective (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Education Press, 2013).
42. “Measuring Up: A Tool for Comparing State Charter School
Laws and Movements,” National Alliance for Public Charter
Schools, accessed October 1, 2014, www.publiccharters.org/
get-the-facts/law-database.
43. Lamar Alexander, quoted in Andrea Zelinski, “Senators’
Fact-Finding Mission on Charter Schools Zeroes in on Pros Not
Cons,” City Paper (Nashville), July 26, 2013, www.
nashvillecitypaper.com/content/city-news/senators-fact-findingmission-charter-schools-zeroes-pros-not-cons.
Write to us!
We welcome comments on American
Educator articles. Address letters to Editor,
American Educator, 555 New Jersey Ave. NW,
Washington, DC 20001, or send comments via
email to [email protected]. Letters selected for
publication may be edited for space and clarity.
Please include your phone number or email
address so we may contact you if necessary.
44. Dana Brinson, Lyria Boast, Bryan C. Hassel, and Neerav
Kingsland, New Orleans–Style Education Reform: A Guide for
Cities; Lessons Learned, 2004–2010 (New Orleans: New
Schools for New Orleans, 2011).
45. Nick Anderson, “Education Secretary Duncan Calls
Hurricane Katrina Good for New Orleans Schools,” Washington
Post, January 30, 2010.
46. Peter W. Cookson and Kristina Berger, Expect Miracles:
Charter Schools and the Politics of Hope and Despair (Boulder,
CO: Westview Press, 2002), 43.
47. Scott D. Pearson, quoted in Mary Ann Zehr, “Regular Public
Schools Start to Mimic Charters,” Education Week, November
10, 2010.
48. Tim Visser, “The Forgotten Promise of Charter Schools,”
Washington Post, September 27, 2013.
49. “Measuring Up.”
50. “Unionized Charter Schools.”
51. “Total Number of Public School Teachers and Percentage of
Public School Teachers in a Union or Employees’ Association, by
State: 1999–2000, 2003–04, and 2007–08,” in National
Center for Education Statistics, Schools and Staffing Survey
(SASS), 2008, http://nces.ed.gov/surveys/sass/tables/
sass0708_043_t1s.asp; and “Percentage Distribution of Public
School Districts, by Type of Agreement with Teachers’
Associations or Unions and Selected Public School District
Characteristics: 2011–2012,” in National Center for Education
Statistics, Schools and Staffing Survey (SASS), 2012, http://nces.
ed.gov/surveys/sass/tables/sass1112_2013311_d1n_007.asp.
52. Chester E. Finn Jr., quoted in “Unions Consider Charter
Schools of Their Own,” New York Times, September 22, 1996.
53. Steven Greenhouse and Jennifer Medina, “Teachers at 2
Charter Schools Plan to Join Union, Despite Notion of
Incompatibility,” New York Times, January 14, 2009.
54. Erica Frankenberg and Genevieve Siegel-Hawley, Equity
Overlooked: Charter Schools and Civil Rights Policy (Los
Angeles: Civil Rights Project, 2009).
55. Erica Frankenberg, Genevieve Siegel-Hawley, and Jia Wang,
Choice without Equity: Charter School Segregation and the
Need for Civil Rights Standards (Los Angeles: Civil Rights Project,
2010).
56. Nelson Smith, quoted in Nick Anderson, “Charter Schools
Becoming Less Racially Diverse, Study Finds,” Washington Post,
February 4, 2010.
57. Paul Tough, “What It Takes to Make a Student,” New York
Times Magazine, November 26, 2006.
58. David Whitman, “An Appeal to Authority: The New
Paternalism in Urban Schools,” Education Next 8, no. 4 (Fall
2008): 52–58.
59. Joe Nathan, “Parents: Yes and No to American Freedom,”
MinnPost, February 27, 2008, www.minnpost.com/
perspectives/2008/02/hometownsourcecom-parents-yes-andno-american-freedom.
60. Letitia Basford, “From Mainstream to East African Charter:
Cultural and Religious Experiences of Somali Youth in U.S.
Schools,” Journal of School Choice 4 (2010): 485.
61. Michael Steinhardt, quoted in Anthony Weiss, “MegaDonor Throws Clout Behind Hebrew Charter School,” Jewish
Daily Forward, June 6, 2008.
62. Bill Wilson, quoted in Joe Nathan, “The Civil Rights Heritage
of Public Charter Schools,” Education News, June 23, 2010.
63. “School or Student Preference,” ECS State Notes,
Educational Commission of the States, accessed April 29, 2014,
http://mb2.ecs.org/reports/Report.aspx?id=79.
64. Rachel Cromidas, “High-Needs Enrollment Targets Could
Challenge Some Charters,” Chalkbeat: New York, May 16,
2012, http://ny.chalkbeat.org/2012/05/16/high-needs-enrollmenttargets-could-challenge-some-charters.
65. “K–12 Education Reform Investment Sites,” Walton Family
Foundation, accessed October 21, 2014, www.waltonfamily
foundation.org/educationreform/market-share-demonstrationsites.
66. “Mission and Overview,” Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation,
accessed November 21, 2013, www.broadeducation.org/
about/overview.html.
67. “About KIPP,” KIPP, accessed November 21, 2013, www.
kipp.org/about-kipp.
68. Frederick M. Hess, “Our Achievement-Gap Mania,”
National Affairs, Fall 2011, 127–128.
69. Albert Shanker, “Goals Not Gimmicks,” Where We Stand,
New York Times, November 7, 1993, Where We Stand Online
Archive, http://locals.nysut.org/shanker.
70. Albert Shanker, quoted in Kahlenberg, Tough Liberal, 318.
44
71. Ted Kolderie, quoted in Beth Hawkins, “Ted Kolderie,
Nationally Honored Education Innovator, Explains Why School
Change Is So Hard,” MinnPost, August 19, 2011, www.
minnpost.com/learning-curve/2011/08/ted-kolderie-nationallyhonored-education-innovator-explains-why-school-chang.
Teacher Voice
6. Greg Anrig, Beyond the Education Wars: Evidence That
Collaboration Builds Effective Schools (New York: Century
Foundation Press, 2013), 2.
7. Ingersoll, Who Controls Teachers’ Work?
8. Gary Barnes, Edward Crowe, and Benjamin Schaefer, The Cost of
Teacher Turnover in Five School Districts: A Pilot Study (Washington,
DC: National Commission on Teaching and America’s Future, 2007).
9. National Commission on Teaching and America’s Future, Policy
Brief: The High Cost of Teacher Turnover (Washington, DC: National
Commission on Teaching and America’s Future, 2007).
10. Eric A. Hanushek and Steven G. Rivkin, Constrained Job
Matching: Does Teacher Job Search Harm Disadvantaged Urban
Schools?, NBER Working Paper 15816 (Cambridge, MA: National
Bureau of Economic Research, 2010).
11. Matthew Ronfeldt, Hamilton Lankford, Susanna Loeb, and James
Wyckoff, How Teacher Turnover Harms Student Achievement, NBER
Working Paper 17176 (Cambridge, MA: National Bureau of
Economic Research, 2011).
Help-Seekers
Endnotes
1. Richard D. Kahlenberg, All Together Now: Creating
Middle-Class Schools through Public School Choice
(Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 2001). See also Russell
W. Rumberger and Gregory J. Palardy, “Does Segregation Still
Matter? The Impact of Student Composition on Academic
Achievement in High School,” Teachers College Record 107
(2005): 1999–2045.
2. Jeannie Oakes, Keeping Track: How Schools Structure
Inequality, 2nd ed. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press,
2005).
3. Ray C. Rist, “Student Social Class and Teacher Expectations:
The Self-Fulfilling Prophecy in Ghetto Education,” Harvard
Educational Review 40 (1970): 411–451. See also Lee Jussim
and Kent D. Harber, “Teacher Expectations and Self-Fulfilling
Prophecies: Knowns and Unknowns, Resolved and Unresolved
Controversies,” Personality and Social Psychology Review 9
(2005): 131–155.
4. Annette Lareau, Home Advantage: Social Class and Parental
Intervention in Elementary School, 2nd ed. (Lanham, MD:
Rowman & Littlefield, 2000). See also Ellen Brantlinger, Dividing
Classes: How the Middle Class Negotiates and Rationalizes
School Advantage (New York: RoutledgeFalmer, 2003).
5. Thurston Domina, “Leveling the Home Advantage: Assessing
the Effectiveness of Parental Involvement in Elementary
School,” Sociology of Education 78 (2005): 233–249.
6. Annette Lareau, Unequal Childhoods: Class, Race, and Family
Life, 2nd ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011).
7. Greg J. Duncan, W. Jean Yeung, Jeanne Brooks-Gunn, and
Judith R. Smith, “How Much Does Childhood Poverty Affect
the Life Chances of Children?,” American Sociological Review
63 (1998): 406–423. See also Selcuk R. Sirin, “Socioeconomic
Status and Academic Achievement: A Meta-Analytic Review of
Research,” Review of Educational Research 75 (2005):
417–453.
8. Tiffani Chin and Meredith Phillips, “Social Reproduction and
Child-Rearing Practices: Social Class, Children’s Agency, and the
Summer Activity Gap,” Sociology of Education 77 (2004):
185–210.
9. Shirley Brice Heath, Words at Work and Play: Three Decades
in Family and Community Life (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2012). See also Lareau, Unequal Childhoods.
10. Valerie E. Lee and David T. Burkam, Inequality at the Starting
Gate: Social Background Differences in Achievement as
Children Begin School (Washington, DC: Economic Policy
Institute, 2002).
11. Doris R. Entwisle, Karl L. Alexander, and Linda Steffel Olson,
Children, Schools, and Inequality (Boulder, CO: Westview Press,
1997).
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to help ELLs read and succeed!
For the past 10 years, the American Federation of Teachers and PBS station
WETA have collaborated to bring you the best, most comprehensive
information, including:
• Strategies and articles
• Classroom videos
• Interviews with researchers,
educators, and authors
• Reading tip sheets
• Multicultural book lists
• Information on the Common Core
and ELLs
• Much, much more on what works
with ELLs
We invite you to join the millions of preK–12
educators of ELLs who have discovered
thousands of resources on Colorín Colorado.
Start using them now!
And on this 10th anniversary, we are proud to have the National Education Association
working with us to support Colorín Colorado!
Charter Schools | High-Stakes Testing | Student Help-Seeking | Librarians as Teachers
Colorín Colorado
is for YOU!
VOL. 38, NO. 4 | WINTER 2014–2015
Whether you are a general educator or a specialist
in teaching English language learners,

Restoring Albert Shanker`s Original Vision for Charter Schools

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